The Passenger is a novel with a false plot that doesn’t matter at all. Things happen, and you think they may be connected, but that connection is never substantiated. So, it is a frustrating novel for anyone who wants events to come together in the end.
What is it about then? It is about Bobby, who has many regrets about his one true love, his sister Stella. She may have desired a sexual relationship, which he shunned. She spent much of her life in a mental institution before killing herself, and he regrets rejecting her and not being there when she died.
The novel consists of many long conversations between men who seem intelligent but are delusional about the world around them and their place in it. Perhaps McCarthy is saying something about how deluded Americans have become in the Trump era.
In between conversations, Bobby has many adventures, from racing car driver to deep sea diver, which starts to look like an improbable Forrest Gump-type life. His adventures don’t let him escape from his regret for his sister.
The novel frequently goes into the schizophrenic mind of Stella as she hallucinates conversations with the imaginary Kid who has been damaged by Thalidomide. The Kid tries to amuse Stella by hosting pitiful cabarets of imaginary performers. Who knows why she chose a character who had Thalidomide as the drug was never approved in the US, so they did not have the flood of babies born with its birth defects.
McCarthy continues his habit of no quotation marks and no attributions for dialogue, which may not have mattered much for his other novels, like the dialogue sparse The Road, but becomes a pain for this book with its masses of dialogue. I frequently wondered who was speaking and had to go back and re-read, but even then, I found it hard to track down who was speaking.
The passenger in the title could be Bobby’s regret about not being there for his sister, or it could mean he had no control over his life and was just a passenger being taken wherever fate decides. It could also be a reference to the plot red herring at the start of the novel, where a passenger has disappeared from a crashed plane.
If you want a novel with a resolved plot, don’t touch this. Don’t frustrate yourself trying. If you want a story ruminating about America’s delusions, this might be the novel for you.