Cormac McCarthy has written 12 novels, mostly Western and post-apocalyptic genres. …

His 2006 novel The Road won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Road was hard to read. But excellent.

You probably saw the film.

---

16 years after The Road, McCarthy published The Passenger (2022).

It’s literature — not easy to follow.

Perhaps I’m not smart enough to appreciate the plotless long sections of dialogue — with no action.

Philosophical. Diversions into the stupidity of the Vietnam war. The potential of science. Physics. War. The assassination of JFK. Formula 2 racing. Smart stuff that doesn’t relate in any way to the story.

The novel follows Bobby Western, a salvage diver, across the Gulf of Mexico and the American South. Western is haunted by his father’s contributions to the development of the atomic bomb. …

Following a salvage dive to recover any survivors from a submerged airplane, Western discovers that the pilot’s flight bag and data box are missing. Within a few days, he returns to his apartment to find two agents of some kind who ask questions …

Bobby goes on the run.

The love of his life was his sister Alicia, a mathematical prodigy and paranoid schizophrenic, who killed herself years before.

Guardian critic Xan Brooks praised the novel, calling it a “glorious sunset song of a novel… It’s rich and it’s strange, mercurial and melancholic.”

I probably won’t read the short sequel, Stella Maris.