For decades the concept of the multiverse — that our universe, born in the crucible of the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, is just one among a potentially infinite number of universes bubble-wrapped together — has raged across cosmology and quantum physics, kindling its own heat and light. Rare is the novelist who would dare loom these ideas into an epic; but then there's no living American writer as sui generis as Cormac McCarthy.
In two new works — "The Passenger" and a companion novella, "Stella Maris" — the 89-year-old master rockets readers into the black hole at the hub of his galactic imagination, an event horizon so rich and dense we can only marvel as we fall through its warped fabric. Sheesh, give the man his Nobel, already.
It's vital that readers engage these books in order of publication. First up: "The Passenger," longer and more layered. In a prologue, set in 1972, a hunter finds a frozen young woman, Alicia Western, dangling from a tree's bough in a snow-blanketed Wisconsin woods.
Eight years later, her older brother, Bobby, a physicist-turned-salvage-diver, plumbs the intact wreck of a JetStar on the sandy bottom of the Gulf of Mexico; one passenger is missing, along with an instrument panel and the pilot's flight pack. From this charged opening McCarthy builds a suspense tale with sinister twists and grace gone wrong.
Once ashore in New Orleans, Bobby catches up with a ragtag crowd of petty crooks and voluble alcoholics; in bars they swap yarns about their pasts, including Bobby's youth among the ravines of east Tennessee, in the shadow of Oak Ridge, where his father oversaw the assembly of the nuclear bomb. That legacy scars him still, rendered in McCarthy's punctuation-free, biblical language.
Bobby's in love with fast cars and puzzles and his dead sister, a mathematical genius for whom he carries an illicit torch. He stumbles into a conspiracy surrounding the crash, sparking a quest that sends him across the country.
A quest, too, across time and space. Throughout "The Passenger" McCarthy weaves in italicized flashbacks, chronicling Alicia's schizophrenic hallucinations, a cast of vaudevillian starring the Thalidomide Kid, a carny barker with flippers for hands. The Kid is the Upside Down incarnation of "The Kid" in "Blood Meridian," both friend and foe, whose jazzy voice echoes in Alicia's head — and ours — long after he exits stage left.
McCarthy is writing in a different key than "The Road," which won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize; here his sentences are cattle prods, zapping us senseless. No one can touch him.
