Okay. Hot take. Just because McCarthy writes it doesn't mean it's good. There was so much potential here—a missing passenger, a government conspiracy, sins of the father—but ultimately it's a wash. At a certain point, the thread of the narrative is lost. Maybe this novel is better served as a dictionary of technical terms for salvage divers, or perhaps a memory house of a man haunted by too many ghosts. As it stands, The Passenger seems wholly unconcerned with its own premise. On the other hand, this duology is likely the last work McCarthy will publish, and this novel encapsulates the neo-Western themes McCarthy has been reaching towards for decades. There's still depth here. McCarthy writes a novel of ideas like no one else. But in places it was weighed down by its own genius, or the smaller moments never accumulating into anything memorable. Maybe Stella Maris will provide better closure, though I'm not, you know, drastically hopeful. I will say this: The Passenger is weird. It's funny and brilliant and sad and philosophical and overlong and missing something substantive. I'll take McCarthy on his worst days over the majority of frontlist fiction. Is it worth the expedition? If you're a McCarthy completionist (the kind of McCarthyism I can get behind!), yes. But this dive is deep. And now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go index a bunch of vocabulary words from this novel for my own personal use.