Review

Books

Culture

2 February 2023

7 min read

Cormac McCarthy's harrowed inheritance

Written before the death of Cormac McCarthy, Austin Stevenson reviews the acclaimed author's last sibling novels, exploring the frugal conversations within them and how dialogues shape virtue.

Austin Stevenson

Austin is a philosophical theologian who works at the intersection of philosophy, religion, and culture.

A diver swims above a crashed plane lying on the sea bed.

A diver investigates a crashed plane on the seabed.

Mael Balland via Unsplash.

This review was first published in March 2023, before Cormac McCarthy's death in June 2023.

When reading The Passenger, the first novel Cormac McCarthy has published since his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Road came out in 2006, I was reminded of a comment E. M. Forster jotted in his notebook about Henry James. ‘However hard you shake his sentences no banality falls out.’ McCarthy has drawn forth prodigious lyricism and acuity by some syntactical alchemy. Rarely in contemporary fiction have I drawn so much delight from just the words on the page. Much of his prose is poetry shrouded in paragraphs.

He scanned the landscape.

Here’s a dream.

This man was a forger of antiquities.

He travelled in documentation.

In the instruments for their preparation.

An old world figure. A dark suit, somewhat travelled in.

A down at the heels formality

to which yet clung the odor of the exotic.

A spectre of saccharine sincerity haunts modern fiction, and the fear of it has all but eviscerated mainstream novels of the polyphonic ornamentation of classical literature. What McCarthy has accomplished here is to recover the elegance, musicality, and intricacy of such great works, but in the context of a spare and denuded grammatical landscape. Sentimentality could not survive for a moment in these two novels, and yet they are genuine and raw to the core.

The Passenger follows Bobby Western, a deep-sea salvage diver who is inspecting a private jet that crashed off the Gulf Coast. He observes that, among the bodies strapped to the seats in this sunken tomb, one passenger from the manifest is missing. This kicks off the plot of the novel, wherein shadowy figures interrogate and surveil Bobby to ascertain what he knows about the missing passenger, seizing his assets and pushing him to an itinerant existence on the road. And yet, to explain the plot of The Passenger is largely to conceal what it is about, for it is primarily a book about ideas: physics, metaphysics, mathematics, and language.

The Passenger’s sibling novel, Stella Maris, is set eight years earlier, in 1972, and follows Bobby’s younger sister, Alicia. It is named for the midwestern psychiatric institution Alicia checks herself into and consists of conversations between Alicia and her psychiatrist. Bobby and Alicia are the children of a physicist who worked on the Manhattan Project with Oppenheimer. “His father. Who had created out of the absolute dust of the earth an evil sun by whose light men saw like some hideous adumbration of their own ends through cloth and flesh the bones in one another’s bodies.” Both initially followed his footsteps into academia, but Bobby dropped out of Caltech to race cars in Europe. Alicia quit after having exhausted the intellectual grist internal to mathematics and failed to resolve the foundational questions haunting the discipline (and reality) itself. “She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture.”

Bobby is lying in a coma in Europe for the entirety of Stella Maris after crashing in a Formula 2 race. By the time he wakes, Alicia has died by suicide. She is ever-present in The Passenger but only as a memory, and the novel is punctuated by chapters that recount her conversations with the Kid, a hallucinatory figure that has followed her since puberty. “The Thalidomide Kid and the old lady with the roadkill stole and Bathless Grogan and the dwarves and the Minstrel Show. All of them gathered at the foot of her bed.” Alicia may or may not be schizophrenic. And autistic. She is also a world-class violinist.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre has argued that it is from those who came before us that we receive the depth or poverty of our language and, to some degree, our conversational habits, and it is through the right kinds of conversations that we learn the relationship between the various goods to which we order our lives and become educated in the virtues. The poverty of conversational idioms that many of us have received does much to cut us off from participation in and pursuit of the goods that contribute to our flourishing. I wonder if literature is a possible antidote to this. Specifically, literature with rich dialogue. And this is one of McCarthy’s great strengths.

'McCarthy is intent on exploring the nature of reality in this novel.'

In dialogue, his characters often start with the end in mind, and then find their way together. Or don’t. Their conversations are frugal, consisting primarily of three- or four-word sentences, and yet they almost always stumble onto to questions of deep significance. There are a lot of rough characters in these novels, but they share a surprising vulnerability. As always, McCarthy doesn’t use quotation marks or tell us who is speaking. When he wants us to, it is easy to follow the flow of dialogue, but occasionally he throws us off the scent. Particularly when Alicia is conversing with her hallucinations, their voices often meld together. The effect amplifies the ethereal quality of their exchanges.

Bobby is in the habit of asking people if they believe in God—a practise he seems to have picked up from his Granellen (his grandmother).

Do you believe in God, Bobby?

I don’t know, Granellen. You asked me that before. I told you. I dont know anything. The best I can say is that I think he and I have pretty much the same opinions. On my better days anyway.

No one has confident answers to this question, but it often serves to push the conversation along an interesting direction. “I dont know who God is or what he is. But I dont believe all this stuff got here by itself.” McCarthy is intent on exploring the nature of reality in this novel, and for him, the question of God is clearly part of that exploration, wherever it may lead. Fortunately, he is well aware that the question of God is not the same question under debate between fundamentalists and atheists.

Do you think of yourself as an atheist?

God no. Those were the good old days.

In their own ways, these characters exhibit an immanence that is haunted by transcendence. This search for some kind of meaning in the everyday stuff of existence might stand behind McCarthy’s frequent use of sacramental imagery drawn from the Catholicism of his youth. Evil cannot be depicted adequately without a conception of the good of which it is a privation. One might read McCarthy as reverse-engineering this process—ascertaining goodness by staring down its absence.

There is a tension in these novels between words and numbers. Which is more real? These questions are closely bound up with the characters’ struggles with mental illness and grief. For Alicia, “intelligence is numbers. It’s not words. Words are things we’ve made up. Mathematics is not.” She insists on the transcendent nature of mathematics and many of her conversations with her therapist centre on precisely these questions about what is real, true, stable, with frequent mention of Platonism. This brought to mind Viktor Frankl’s insistence that treating mental illness requires that we acknowledge its existential dimension. ’Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life.’ Alicia’s mental illness is bound up with her own search for meaning, and vice versa, as well as with the dark cloud that hangs over her family’s legacy. “For a long time I’ve suspected that we might be simply incapable of imagining the epochal evils of which we stand rightly accused and I thought it at least a possibility that the structure of reality itself harbors something like the forms of which our sordid history is only a pale reflection.” History falls short of the forms of the age.

Transcendence isn’t the only spectre that haunts these pages, and there is a kind of paranoia running through the narrative that seems fitting in an era rife with conspiracy thinking. Given his father’s exploits, Bobby is not particularly surprised to discover documents missing from Granellen’s home, or his own apartment rifled through while he’s gone. As Joseph Heller wrote, 'Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not after you.' It’s clear that someone is after Bobby, and the entire family may or may not be subject to clandestine observation. But there is also a broader sense of powers beyond our control watching, hounding, manipulating.

You think somebody’s after you?

I don’t know. I just wonder if maybe lots of people dont feel that way.

For no reason.

Yeah.

They have inherited a troubled legacy, but each, in their own way, has learned to talk about it, and that’s no small thing. This may be McCarthy’s most ambitious work, and you don’t need to understand it to find it extremely enjoyable.

Review

Culture

Music

Politics

25 July 2025

6 min read

As the congregation gathers Bruce Springsteen leans hard into hope

Chords of confrontation and communion

Elizabeth Wainwright

Elizabeth Wainwright is a writer, coach and walking guide. She's a former district councillor and has a background in international development.

Bruce Springsteen crouches down and holds a hand out to a sea of outstretched hands

Springsteen plays Manchester.

Brucespringsteen.net.

I finally got to experience a Bruce Springsteen concert recently. Which is to say, for three hours, I touched a land of hope and dreams.

We walked along a canal to get to the arena – my husband, my father-in-law, and me –Manchester shimmered with the arrival of summer, and light bounced off red brick and still water. We neared the arena and the air felt dense with anticipation. T Between us we carried heartbreaks, elections, hopes, failures, and a collective return to music that had accompanied and clarified it all. We were drawn by loyalty and nostalgia and joy, but also I sensed by a hope that Bruce would meet the moment — the frayed, furious, anxious now — with something that mattered.

We found our seats and gripped our drinks as the lights dimmed. Thousands of people stopped individual conversations, and hushed, and then joined voices into a deep and reverent chant. “Bruuuuuuuce”. To my right, the glow of a screen, the woman holding it sending a text – “yes babe, 1pm, lovely” – and it seemed incongruent and true. In the tension before the release, in the dark before the light, we hold our breath even as the ordinary carries on. The ordinary carries on even as the world fractures and glows. The ordinary is what Bruce often sings of, it is one reason why fans feel heard and seen by him. That night though, all the ordinaries he sang of formed something extraordinary.

Then there was light, and Bruce walked slowly from the side to the front of the stage, his guitar suspended across his body, his face a relaxed, broad smile, his bandmates and companions beside and behind him. Then there was music. No videos, no pyrotechnics; just old songs that felt as if they existed for the now. My City of Ruins, Death to My Hometown, Land of Hope and Dreams, The Promised Land. The song Long Walk Home was introduced as a “prayer to my country”. It is a country that he embodies, despairs of, and loves. He sings of his home with fury, sorrow, tenderness, and love.

Riffs and rhythms that were decades old were being made urgent again. Springsteen’s music holds both grit and glory, and hard-won joys leave space for sorrow. I write this and lines by Mary Oliver come to mind: “We shake with joy, we shake with grief / what a time they have these two / housed as they are in the same body.” What a time they had, joy and grief, that night with Bruce.

The evening unfolded not as spectacle but as liturgy; all of us involved in something like devotion – in part to Bruce, but also to moral clarity, to the power of poetry, to the promise of who we could be. At times the crowd seemed silent, ushered into something deeper – not entertainment or escapism, but something like confrontation and communion. We were being offered the joy of music and memory, but also an opportunity to reckon with who we are.

Between songs, Bruce spoke. He apparently rarely does so in his gigs. His voice slowed and deepened – not chit chat, not to entertain, but to bear witness and stand defiant and call us to the best versions of ourselves. “I’ve spent my life singing about where we’ve succeeded and come up short in pursuit of our civic values,” he said. “I just felt that was my job.” He proceeded to describe how those values are being torn apart, and why they matter. The crowd roared. He was making civic values shine, speaking about them with urgency. He acknowledged both the dream and the failure, but still he believes in the promised land and he asks us to as well. Before he belted out Rainmaker, he said, “when conditions in a country are right for a demagogue, you can bet one will show up.” He spoke of America, and really of the world – what it is, what it is becoming. His honesty and poetic rage situated us, then became a map for how to keep going.

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts.

I found myself wondering: why is it that Bruce can sing and speak about justice, warped politics, and who we are becoming, and be met with cheers, while so many churches avoid doing so, preferring instead to whisper in neutral tones while the world burns? That night, I stood in a crowd of thousands and I heard a kind of moral clarity that orientates the soul and made me cry. It wasn’t partisan, it was human. Why can it feel riskier to speak specifically and prophetically in a sermon than in a stadium? I wonder if it’s because Springsteen has always rooted his politics in people’s real lives – in work, family, grief, memory. He doesn’t gesture toward abstract ideologies for fear of alienating people, or in the hope of retaining fans: he tells stories and gives names to problems and injustices, singing about crooked institutions, boarded-up factories, buses that never come, lovers who don’t come back.

The evening felt, for me, like the kind of church I long for and sometimes touch: no tidy answers, no insincere lyrics, no vague calls for justice, but rather honesty and specificity and the chance to stand alongside strangers and feel something challenging, beautiful, true.

I scribbled a question as the music soared: can a chord be mystical? Because that’s how it felt. As if there are progressions – minor then major, dissonance into harmony – that can reach past language and speak directly to the part of us that longs for love more than cynicism, to the part of us that still dares to hope even when there is very little obvious reason to do so, to the part of us wondering how to be truly alive.

Near the end, Bruce quoted the American writer James Baldwin:

“In this world, there isn’t enough humanity as one would hope. But there’s enough.”

There’s enough. It was a small phrase but it hung in the air like incense. For Bruce, there is enough humanity to keep singing for, and about. Now, he seemed to ask the crowd, what will you do with that enoughness, with that humanity?

In the final stretch, Bruce leaned hard into hope with songs like The Rising and Born to Run. The energy in the room felt like resistance – not against something, but for something. He didn’t pretend everything’s fine, but he sang anyway. “It ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

We can be glad to be alive even while we are honest about sorrow, injustice, broken politics, fractured families, and tired hearts. Gladness is being asked to stand its ground now, and to do something with our improbable aliveness. For the final song, Bruce played Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom. It is a song about lightning and exiles and freedom, about the trembling of the soul and about a sky that “cracked its poems in naked wonder.” He sang it slowly, tenderly, like a prayer – which can also be a trembling of the soul, a song of naked wonder. Perhaps he prayed to God, perhaps to some other sacred thing: our better angels, or the fragile hope of who we might yet become.

In a BBC documentary about Bruce Springsteen’s history with the UK, someone says “there’s something in Bruce fans, you know you can implicitly trust them.” As we filed out of the arena, it felt like 25,000 of us briefly knew each other, trusted each other, could take on the world together. Perhaps we just had.

Soon it was just me, my husband, my father-in-law, and the silent dark canal as we walked back into the night. We were tired, we were awake. I thought of Bruce’s belief in the promised land, and of Baldwin’s line: there’s not enough humanity, but there’s enough. These are beliefs that can feel risky. So can belief in God. But enough is plenty. Enough can turn up the volume and let the spirit be our guide. With 25,000 other people, I’d turned that volume up and I could hear the spirit defiant, unifying, guiding. It is – has always been – time to go and sing of it, despite everything.