“It’s fascinating to look at a writer who’s 89 and who’s writing a book that feels pretty far away from his early works,” said Jenny Jackson, an executive editor at Knopf who worked on the books with McCarthy. And since the Z carried no charge this meant that the neutrino coming in would stay a neutrino.” At times, the narratives feel disjointed and bogged down in arcane details and enigmatic concepts, for example, in a passage where Bobby discusses the theories of the physicist Steven Weinberg: “Still he figured that if you had these neutrino-nucleon collisions that spun off the W particle and gave you a lepton with the opposite charge you’d have to get a Z particle every once in a while. It remains to be seen how fans of McCarthy’s earlier works will respond to the novels, which are wildly different from anything he’s done before. “Even if he’s not practicing mathematics and physics, there’s something beautiful to him about the unyielding quality of a difficult thought,” said Krakauer, who read early versions of the novels.
In one passage, McCarthy writes with reverence about gravitons - hypothetical elementary particles with no mass - and describes one as “a creature imagined but never seen.” In another, he compares the incremental nature of time passing to “a bird trapped in a barn that moves through the slats of light bird by bird. The story unfolds as dialogue between Alicia and her doctors, as she describes how her pursuit of revolutionary mathematical theories brought her to the brink of madness. She is suicidal and hears voices that manifest as characters from a Vaudevillian nightmare, including the Kid, a foul-mouthed dwarf with flippers for hands. “Stella Maris” unfolds in 1972 at a mental institution in Wisconsin, where Alicia has been admitted and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He sheds his identity but can’t escape his past, and he is tormented by memories of Alicia, a mentally unstable genius who killed herself. After his co-worker turns up dead, he is trailed by strange men in suits and goes on the run.
Set mostly in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 1980, it follows Bobby, who works as a salvage diver and discovers something suspicious in the wreckage of a sunken jet. At nearly 400 pages, “The Passenger” reads at times like a thriller, albeit a digressive, metaphysical one. The novels tell the tragic story of Bobby and Alicia Western, siblings who are haunted by their physicist father’s role in the development of the atom bomb, and by their romantic longing for each other.
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