The Passenger, Cormac McCarthy

The first of what was supposed to be a two-volume story. Bobby Western is a salvage diver who is overcome with losing his sister, now being pursued by the government (we think) for a sunken jet with mysterious undertones, a father who helped create the bomb, and other blanket happenings that just cannot be explained. His buddy Oiler dies while salvaging a wreck; ‘suits’ following his every move; a past with 900K from coins buried in his family home; his brilliant sister who committed suicide at sixteen who was in a mental institution and whom he’d given a half a million in cash to; people that his father worked for came to their home and took everything – photo albums, documents, guns… presumingly because his father and mother had worked in the nuclear project during WW2; he seeks assistance from a private investigator who always seems to have good advice; the IRS seizes his accounts; hallucinations, spirits, inner sanity, his dead sister’s psyche talks to him; visits his sister’s sanitarium in Wisconsin and finds she left him 23K in cash along with a note. If you like haunting, mind-reflection, and literature on levels you might find intriguing in a novel, this book is for you. McCarthy tends to lead with dismay and keep you down through the hardship of his characters – mental peeling of the soul. This is no different.

Unfortunately, McCarthy just passed, though he gave us quite a portfolio of gifts on the written page.