McCarthy returns with cryptic book
It has been 16 years since Cormac McCarthy released “The Road” and won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, cementing his reputation as a master American novelist. Plenty of time, then, to write two books for fans to savor in 2022.
The first, “The Passenger,” is out now, and while it has that traditional McCarthy style (spare prose, few commas and adjectives, scant apostrophes and no quotation marks to tell you who’s talking), it is nothing if not original. It’s difficult to summarize the plot, but the protagonist is a guy with a great name, Bobby Western. The novel begins in Mississippi in 1980 as Bobby, working as a salvage diver, is about to explore the wreckage of a plane crash. We learn there’s a passenger from the manifest whose body is not on board and the black box is missing. But this is definitely not a mystery novel. If you turn the pages hoping for answers, you won’t find them.
What you will find are deep discussions about quantum mechanics, God, the atomic bomb, who killed JFK and, of course, love. We learn Bobby’s younger sister, Alicia, was a child mathematics prodigy, who while studying for her doctorate at the University of Chicago years ago, committed herself to a mental hospital named Stella Maris in Wisconsin before killing herself. (“Stella Maris” is also the name of the companion novel to be published Dec. 6.) We learn their father and mother worked on the Manhattan Project. Oh, and we learn the siblings loved each other. Incestuously? Unclear. But it certainly haunts them both. Alicia is a diagnosed schizophrenic, visited by various “chimeras.”
It’s difficult to follow at times, in part because the secondary characters are barely introduced. Someone is looking for Bobby, and he avoids detection by wandering through the South talking philosophy and cars and nuclear annihilation with people from his past and present as we stitch together his story. Reading “Stella Maris” later this year will help some. Taking the form of transcripts between Alicia and her doctor, it’s formatted as a series of interviews with the patient, set eight years before the events of “The Passenger.”
Both of these books ruminate on consciousness, what it truly means to be alive and whether there are universal truths that govern the world. And while it’s fair to not expect answers to questions so big, some readers will wonder why the stories have to be so cryptic. — Rob Merrill, Associated Press
George Saunders is back with a new collection
of short stories that feature his usual dystopian worlds and heartland characters whose lives and language have been fractured by social and economic pressures they barely understand.
In this collection of nine stories, Saunders’ outrage runs deep, and at least a couple of them, including “Love Letter” and “The Mom of Bold Action,” can be read as parables of our current political situation.
In the latter, a small-town mom flirts with vigilantism when her son gets pushed to the ground by a mentally disturbed homeless man. Ultimately, Saunders, for whom kindness is a paramount virtue, pulls her back from the brink and restores her moral compass, albeit imperfectly.
In “Love Letter,” which is set in the near future during the fourth administration of a Trump-like family, a doting grandfather advises his beloved grandson to steer clear of political activism even as he questions his and his wife’s own complacency during a “critical period” when democracy was being dismantled.
In last year’s “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” Saunders offered up a master class in fiction writing by analyzing seven short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Gogol and Tolstoy. You could buy that book if you want to understand what made those stories great. Or you could simply read the stories in this one.