The Road

After sixteen years of silence, Cormac McCarthy has literally written a novel and a half. That’s the good news. Perhaps less-good news is that about half the longer novel depicts conversations between a mad person and an imaginary deformed imp called The Thalidomide Kid, while all of the half-novel is a dialogue between the same mad person and her psychiatrist. The unequivocal bad news is that quite a lot of both is about quantum physics, by way of ruminations on the Manhattan Project and a JFK conspiracy theory: an unholy trinity of literary red flags. I do not mean to dissuade anyone from reading a rare new work by one of America’s finest living writers. Parts of The Passenger and its “coda,” Stella Maris, are very funny. Parts are even brilliant.

Cormac McCarthy of all living American novelists has realized most fully the potential grandeur of his métier by revealing the spiritual condition of our time in the old epic language. In this sense, he is the most serious American novelist of the post-war era. McCarthy’s work is magnificently oblivious to modern industrial and technological society and to the post-urban and suburban culture of consumerism, triviality and superficiality that are its fruits: the penalty a decadent civilization pays for its self-alienation from nature, humanity and metaphysical reality, and its embrace of an artificial world in which what is real and human withers and dries up, and art becomes well-nigh impossible.