Reviews: 'The Passenger' and 'Stella Maris,' by Cormac McCarthy

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.

The Kid struts and curses like a sailor, but McCarthy never strays from his Southern-bred lyricism, as when Bobby tries to escape his agonies (and the men who are out to get him) by embracing a hermit's life: "He moved to a shack out on the dunes just south of Bay St. Louis. In the evenings he'd walk the beach and look out over the gray water where skeins of pelicans came laboring down the coast in their slow tandem flights above the offshore swells. Improbable birds ... He'd no money to buy bottled gas for the cookstove so he cooked on the woodstove as well. Rice and fish. Dried apricots."

By contrast "Stella Maris" — sea star — is a formal departure, a series of dialogues between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, during her final hospitalization in Wisconsin at the end of 1972. These minimalist exchanges are tonally complex — ominous, hilarious, sarcastic, sacred — countervailing weights to the intricacies of "The Passenger," both enhancing and undermining what we think we know about the Westerns.

By the novella's end Dr. Cohen is the patient and Alicia the physician who will heal herself in a snow-clad forest.

Math, for Alicia, is the face of God, the same yesterday, and today, and forever, after the last white dwarf in our universe snuffs out. Not so we mortals. We must pick through our flotsam, stringing stories together.

As the Kid says to Alicia, "The first thing is to locate the narrative line. It doesn't have to hold up in court. Start splicing in your episodes. Your anecdotals. You'll figure it out. Just remember where there's no linear there's no delineation. ... Nobody's asking you to sign anything, okay?"

The end of the road is damnation, not transcendence. Like Moses, McCarthy seeks a land of milk and honey beyond the rim of the universe, but spies only oblivion (and perhaps the ghostly glow of math). Despite the darkness ahead, "The Passenger" and "Stella Mars" crown a magnificent career that will guide us forward, for as long as the lights stay on.

A contributing books editor for Oprah Daily, Hamilton Cain reviews for a range of venues, including the Star Tribune, the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn.

The Passenger

By: Cormac McCarthy.

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 400 pages, $30.

Stella Maris

By: Cormac McCarthy.

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf, 208 pages, $26, in stores Dec. 6.