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McCarthy has been considered America’s most important living writer since 2007’s The Road. For ten years he worked on The Passenger and the deferred novel Stella Maris (which cannot be reviewed yet due to embargo). In between, he wrote his first screenplay, The Counselor, the successful story of an American lawyer who believes he can get involved with the Mexican drug mafia. The fact that the film failed was more due to director Ridley Scott, that esthete who became more and more self-satisfied over the years; but perhaps American-Mexican gang wars were in better hands with seasoned thriller researchers like Don Winslow than with McCarthy.
McCarthy is now 89. Both works, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris”, he should consider as a legacy. This explains why he links the tragic heroic journey of a pair of siblings who are probably in an incestuous relationship, which seems to have been turned into “Passenger”, with two world-changing American events of the 20th century: the invention of the atomic bomb and the assassination of JFK. It’s about a question of guilt: Is the world a worse place today because the USA has become a shaken (perpetrator) nation? McCarthy considers both cuts more mythological than historical, for example, lets one character glorify the attempted assassination of the president as an inside job.
McCarthy turns the “greatest generation” into a generation that passes on a legacy. Protagonist Bobby Western is being hunted by the FBI because he is believed to be a criminal as the son of a researcher working with Oppenheimer; the only thing that plagues him is the knowledge that he is the son of someone who is partly responsible for the deaths in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Bobby’s sister Alicia (from whose point of view “Stella Maris” is told) received psychiatric treatment and committed suicide. It is unclear whether the elderly McCarthy was still doing research for the dissociative, often joking monologues of the patients (“I’m not alone. I’m schizophrenic”) – for top placements on Amazon in the non-fiction (!) category “Schizophrenia” it was already enough.
But it is precisely Bobby’s stories that lack that great, poetic laconicism that characterized McCarthy’s “Border Crossers”, as does the breathtaking fatalism of “Blood Meridian”. The doomed “passengers” practice commonplaces that are intended to explain the meaninglessness of life, but do not enhance their characters themselves: “Time flies when you’re having fun.”
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