Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Passenger’ Asks One Important Question: Do You Believe In God?
The cover of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Passenger.”
(REVIEW) American novelist Cormac McCarthy isn’t open about much at all in terms of his personal life or his own writing, but he is open about the fact that he prefers the company of physicists and other scientists to the company of other writers.
A 2005 profile by Richard B. Woodward for Vanity Fair places McCarthy and his work of the past two decades in the context of his workspace — the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank utilized by great scientists from around the world. McCarthy is described as regularly attending lectures and workshops and engaging in private discussions with scientists there.
“I like being around smart, interesting people, and the people who come here are among the smartest, most interesting people on the planet,” he says in the profile.
It’s unsurprising, therefore, that McCarthy’s two new novels serve in part as “a love letter to 20th century studies of physics” — though I use that phrase only to call on the cliche. In all likelihood, McCarthy wouldn’t consider them love letters to anything.
“The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” separate novels with intertwining narratives, are McCarthy’s first books since his 2006 novel “The Road.” Many wonder whether these books will be his last, or whether these books signal the author’s return to new release shelves.
The two protagonists of the novel set are siblings Bobby and Alicia Western, children of a great 20th century physicist and maker of the atom bomb.
Alicia is a genius mathematician who is, quite literally, too smart for her own good. “The Passenger” begins with her suicide and, looking through the past, introduces several humanoid hallucinations of Alicia’s that both taunt her and try to guide her somewhat through life. She will be the main character of “Stella Maris,” her story told entirely through transcripts of conversations with her psychiatrist.
Bobby, whose grief over his sister’s death and life on the fringes of society is explored as the primary narrative of “The Passenger,” once tried to be a physicist like his father, but he quit to become a deepwater salvage diver. When a friend asks him why he ultimately quit, he says, “I was okay. I could do it — just not at the level where it really mattered.”
This isn’t to say that Bobby is a direct foil of McCarthy, but they do have this in common.
“There were a lot of things I could have done,” McCarthy once told Woodward, recounted in a Guardian article. “I certainly had a pretty good grasp of architecture. But truthfully I’m not a scientist. I don’t really think like that. I could have been a physicist but not a world-class physicist. Whatever I was going to be I wanted to be really good.”
McCarthy is without a doubt a really good novelist. Is Bobby a really good deepwater salvage diver? Eh, sort of. Bobby is good, but that’s only until he becomes a target of the government after one of these dives. He lives the rest of his time as a vagrant with very few long-lasting connections and very many personal losses.
Either way, Bobby knows as much about physics as McCarthy does, which is enough to sustain snappy conversations on the nature of the universe during drawn out — and delicious-sounding — lunches with friends. Compared to the knowledge of the common man, it’s a great deal of knowledge about physics, and McCarthy shares it unsparingly.
This may make the novel a dense read for some — but hey, that’s McCarthy for you.
Ultimately, though, the key to the novel isn’t understanding physics at a graduate level. It’s understanding how concepts of science and mathematics shape an understanding of the world and just how impossible it is to fit the idea of God into an equation.
The novel is pretty clear about this thesis, though it presents a competing thesis every 10 pages or so. In the midst of one of Alicia’s conversations with her hallucination, the Thalidomide Kid, he tells her: “You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you cant help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed.”
There’s one more important note to make here: Bobby and Alicia are in love with each other.
McCarthy has long written about people on the fringes of society who are all but forced to live in relative isolation; the Westerns are no different. If they weren’t already plagued enough by isolation, a doomed incestual adoration is enough to ensure complete separation from ordinary society. Each claims the relationship was unconsummated, but Alicia is plagued with guilt over her feelings, due in no small part to the goading of Kid; Bobby, whose few friends know his secret, refuses all offers to be set up on dates or otherwise find a partner.
It’s the one final transgression that seals the fates of the Westerns and drives home the inescapable tragedy that accompanies the life of an outcast.
McCarthy loves dialogue too much for Bobby to really be alone, however. Instead, he’s just perpetually lonely. Still, he talks to friends, acquaintances, bartenders and others he meets. In nearly each new conversation, one character asks, “Do you believe in God?”
Each person has a different answer, far more complicated than a simple yes or no. Most are imbued with some kind of hopelessness or dour uncertainty.
The person with the most faithful view of God is Bobby’s friend Debussy, a transgender woman whom he shares an emotional bond with.
“I woke up one night in the middle of the night and I was lying there and I thought: If there is no higher power then I’m it,” she tells Bobby at one of their lunches. “And that just scared the shit out of me. There is no God and I am she.”
But after he asks her that plain yet boundless question, Debussy recounts another story: “About a year after this I woke up again and it was like I had heard this voice in my sleep and I could still hear the echo of it and it said: If something did not love you you would not be here.”
By the time Bobby manages to be almost entirely alone, he has stopped striving for any semblance of a normal life in community with others. He is peaceful, and he feels safer than he ever has, but a quiet sadness lingers. An old friend approaches Bobby to ask questions about his life.
Bobby tells him, “I live in a windmill. I light candles for the dead and I’m trying to learn how to pray.”
“What do you pray for?” the man asks.
“I don’t pray for anything, I just pray,” Bobby says.
McCarthy’s novels, apart from serving as vessels for memorable prose and great American literature, offer a stark look at humanity by delving into some of its least common stories. “The Passenger” doesn’t offer a lot in the way of moral lessons or new theology, but it does expel a range of heady emotions and the opportunity to question, well, everything.
Start here. Regardless of who you are, what you’ve done, who you love, how much physics you know, who’s after you, or where you're headed, maybe just ask yourself: Do I believe in God?
Jillian Cheney is a contributing culture writer for Religion Unplugged. She also writes on American Protestantism and evangelical Christianity and was Religion Unplugged’s 2020-21 Poynter-Koch fellow. You can find her on Twitter @_jilliancheney.