After the triumph of The Road (2006), his tenth and most famous novel, and the surrealist passage in the Oprah Winfrey show in 2007, Cormac McCarthy, undoubtedly startled by such media unpacking, had taken the tangent. It must be remembered that since his debut in 1965, the American writer had always refused to give a literary interview to the press. You could always talk to him about the weather and the little birds in an El Paso bar, but not about his job. He made an exception in 1992 when his legendary publisher, Albert Erskine, who was also Faulkner’s, retired from Random House. As a parting gift to Erskine and to please his new editor, Gary Fisketjon of Knopf, the writer agreed to give an interview to Richard B. Woodward in The New York Times. However, he did not give himself up more than that, considering it preferable to discuss with his interlocutor, in a cantina in New Mexico, the dangerousness of rattlesnakes, his taste for Wittgenstein, country music or computers (he who since 1965 has typed all his books on a light typewriter, an Olivetti Lettera 32)!
McCarthy could concede this favor to Knopf, the Nobel publisher, who had decided to bet on him when none of his first five novels had sold more than 5000 copies! In six months, So Pretty Horses, the first part of his border trilogy, was crowned with several major prizes, including the National Book Award, and sold 160,000 copies in large format!
The second literary interview of her career was therefore the show of the high priestess of television Oprah Winfrey. After having selected La Route in her book club, she invited the great invisible man in front of her cameras. If the interview is today judged as one of the worst she has ever conducted, it is not because McCarthy did not play the game. He answered soberly questions without interest, too delighted no doubt not to have to expose himself more. This television appearance and obtaining the Pulitzer Prize nevertheless led to phenomenal sales for La Route, which quickly exceeded one million copies. Since then, radio silence. In bookstores, however, business continued to turn well thanks to the film adaptations of his latest novels, No Country for Old Men in 2007 by the Coen brothers and The Road in 2009 by John Hillcoat.
In 2015, it was announced that a novel titled Le Passager would be released soon. Since then, nothing, except the rumor that the health of the writer, then 81 years old, had deteriorated dangerously. It was then learned that McCarthy would not publish The Passenger until he had completed his supplement, now known as Stella Maris. On March 8, 2022, we announced the publication in November in the United States of the two volumes then their translation in France, at the Olivier, in March and May 2023.
Here we are! And as much to say that it was worth waiting all this time to read Le Passager and, for the time being in English, Stella Maris (May 5 in bookstores). The Passenger is a great tragic love story in two parts. It is also a noir novel in which the hero, a diver, discovers the wreckage of a damaged plane in the Gulf of Mexico. The black box and a passenger are missing. Very quickly, it is clear that the writer is making fun of this plot. It just serves him to place his hero, Bobby Western, in a delicate situation. Men (from the FBI?) are watching him, tracking him down, trying to find out what he knows about this plane story and pushing him to flee.
Bobby is the usual “McCarthian” character, the silent “poor lonesome cowboy” who goes on all sorts of not always pleasant adventures. Which doesn’t seem to be a problem for him. Bobby likes to live dangerously. F2 driver, he ended his career with an accident and a long coma. Today, at 37, he accepts contracts that send him diving into turbulent waters, landing on rickety oil platforms… Bobby is looking for danger. He has nothing more to lose. The love of his life, his sister Alicia, ended his life when he was in a coma. Alicia, of great beauty, was a high-flying mathematician, a genius struck down by her brother’s accident and by the impossibility of living their love. This is the second time that the great American writer has staged a story of incest. The first was in L’Obscurité du hors, in 1969. A woman became pregnant by her brother, who then got rid of the baby in the forest… Here, nothing is consumed but Alicia has gradually consumed herself .
For the first time in McCarthy’s work, a female character is more than a silhouette. Bobby blames himself for not having been able to protect his sister. As we follow the brother’s wanderings, on the road, in bars, in seedy hotels, McCarthy slips in quotation marks chapters that show Alicia, ten years earlier, plagued by her demons in the mental institution where she is. was admitted for schizophrenia. She is visited by grotesque creatures led by a gnome, the Kid, who constantly bombards her with questions and reproaches. Which earned us tasty exchanges that remind us that McCarthy is an outstanding dialogist who also excels in the comic register. When Bobby meets “the lanky”, a colorful character, arsouille with a flowery verb, it gives: “The last time I saw Lady Jaquelyn, she had completely given up clothes to dress with tarpaulins (…) . All of this conjures up images on which it is better not to dwell. Its titanic hilly foundation that wriggles in the street like a bundle of cats about to drown. It shudders just to think about it.”
Other dialogues relate to scientific theories and the atomic bomb, of which the father of Bobby and Alicia was one of the inventors with Oppenheimer. One more reason for his children to feel a certain discomfort. There is also a question of the theses on the assassination of Kennedy. We wonder at first where all this leads us but it’s part of the game, like the long monologues in Tarantino’s films: we adhere or not! With McCarthy, we know that we have to accept being carried away by the strangeness without always trying to understand.
By writing the story of this incestuous duo torn apart by death, McCarthy confronts us with our loss of bearings, with our disoriented lives in a world without rhyme or reason. He was never a great optimist. Its last pages are absolutely beautiful: “The eras of men stretch from tomb to tomb. Accounts on a slate. The blood, the darkness. The dead children who are washed on a board…” With The Passenger (and then Stella Maris), the author beautifully completes a dark work begun sixty years ago and in which God seems to have left the keys of the world to Satan. .
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