The Passenger

The Passenger is a 2022 novel by the American writer Cormac McCarthy. It was released six weeks before its companion novel Stella Maris. The plot of both The Passenger and Stella Maris follows Bobby and Alicia Western, two siblings whose father helped develop the atomic bomb. The Passenger is McCarthy's first novel since The Road, sixteen years prior. McCarthy had been writing The Passenger intermittently since the 1970s. It was generally well received by critics. Plot 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, and tormented by his inability to save his sister Alicia—the protagonist of the novel's proto-sequel, Stella Maris—from suicide, which happens a decade before The Passenger takes place. Alicia was a mathematics prodigy who worked under the tutelage of Alexander Grothendieck (a real mathematician who shunned the field at the peak of his influence and chose to live in relative seclusion). The Western siblings grow up in east Tennessee as their father works at Oak Ridge on the Manhattan Project (with luminary physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer). Both children are math prodigies; Alicia studies at the University of Chicago while Bobby drops out of CalTech to pursue a career as a Formula 2 race car driver in Europe, though a serious crash puts him in a temporary coma and ends his driving career. The events of the novel are punctuated with short, italicized chapters about Alicia's treatment for schizophrenia due to hallucinations of a deformed figure the narrator named "Thalidomide Kid" who perpetually teases and belittles her and summons his ghostly cohorts to perform unwanted and garish entertainment acts. Following a salvage dive to recover any survivors from a submerged airplane, Bobby 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 about the submerged airplane and the missing items, and Western learns there was also a missing eighth passenger.