THE PASSENGER by Cormac McCarthy

This novel has two great opening scenes.  The first is a young woman’s suicide by hanging.  The second is a sunken plane full of dead passengers.  Despite this auspicious beginning, I would describe this book as uneven.  Some parts I would give five stars, rating this the author’s best read since The Road, and other parts merit only two stars.  The main character is Bobby Western, a salvage diver, and the woman who commits suicide is his brilliant and beautiful sister, Alicia, a mathematician.  These two characters are in love with each other.  Seriously.  Most of the chapters are Bobby’s, but some are Alicia’s, and these latter ones just annoyed me, partly because they are in italics and partly because they are peopled with characters who are products of her schizophrenia.  Bobby, on the other hand, is mostly a man of few words, and although there is some great dialog here, I found it difficult to keep up with who was saying what.  Especially challenging is a long conversation between Bobby and another man about quantum mechanics, and physics is not my long suit.  More intriguing is the fact that the IRS freezes all of Bobby’s assets, although probably not for owing back taxes.  Rather, his problem seems to stem from the fact that a passenger was missing from the cabin of the underwater plane.  If I thought the sequel, Stella Maris, would further address this sinister situation, I would read it, but apparently it is just about Alicia’s psychiatric treatment.

THE CROSSING by Cormac McCarthy

Fortunately, I remember some of my college Spanish, as this book contains a lot of it, and the author doesn’t always translate it.  Some of it I ignored, some of it I got the main idea from the context, and some of it I looked up.  The timeframe is not really clear until later in the book when the U.S. enters WWII.  The protagonist, a teenager named Billy, rides off from New Mexico to return an injured wolf to Mexico, leaving behind his parents and younger brother and taking with him the family’s only firearm.  Billy encounters all sorts of people, both good and bad, in the course of his travels.  Without the good people, he never would have survived all three of his forays into Mexico, but, if it weren’t for the bad people, he might not have had to return there at all.  Billy has skills that serve him well most of the time, but luck can be a fickle companion. This book reminded me a bit of Huckleberry Finn without the humor and with a horse as the means of travel instead of a raft.  Since this is a Cormac McCarthy novel, you know it is going to be Dark with a capital D.  The section that I found most riveting is one in which a very competent doctor is patching up a bullet wound, where the bullet went straight through.  In another section that held my attention, a passerby treats a horse’s knife wound with a strange brew and a poultice.  I guess I just liked the healing better than the bloodshed.

SUTTREE by Cormac McCarthy

Cornelius Suttree is living on a houseboat near Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1951.  He makes a living—if you want to call it that—fishing on the river with trotlines.  Suttree is a friend to everybody he meets and the ultimate good Samaritan, usually to the detriment of his own well-being.  Some of these so-called friends he meets in jail, or more specifically, the workhouse, where he is occasionally confined for passing out in an inebriated state in a public place.  One previously incarcerated friend is Harrogate, a teenager who has been caught defiling watermelons—you can guess what that entails--that don’t belong to him.  Suttree gets dragged into various capers, most of which are illegal, such as poisoning bats, robbing banks, and disposing of dead bodies.  He always protests getting involved in these schemes but eventually finds it easier to go along than to resist.  The cast of ne’er-do-well characters in Suttree’s life is voluminous, and I finally gave up trying to keep them straight.  Suttree’s mysterious past proves that he has not always been someone to rely on, but we get only the briefest glimpse of that.  I suppose you could say that this book is darkly humorous, with the emphasis on “darkly.” It reads like a cross between Tobacco Road and Huckleberry Finn, but, ironically, almost every sentence contains a word that I don’t recognize.  Did I look them all up?  No, or I would still be reading this book.