While the Westerns’ doomed love story drives the narratives, McCarthy seems most interested in his characters’ ideas about the nature of time and reality. The story unfolds as dialogue between Alicia and her doctors, as she describes how her pursuit of revolutionary mathematical theories brought her to the brink of madness. She is suicidal and hears voices that manifest as characters from a Vaudevillian nightmare, including the Kid, a foul-mouthed dwarf with flippers for hands. “Stella Maris” unfolds in 1972 at a mental institution in Wisconsin, where Alicia has been admitted and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He sheds his identity but can’t escape his past, and he is tormented by memories of Alicia, a mentally unstable genius who killed herself. After his co-worker turns up dead, he is trailed by strange men in suits and goes on the run. Set mostly in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 1980, it follows Bobby, who works as a salvage diver and discovers something suspicious in the wreckage of a sunken jet. At nearly 400 pages, “The Passenger” reads at times like a thriller, albeit a digressive, metaphysical one. The novels tell the tragic story of Bobby and Alicia Western, siblings who are haunted by their physicist father’s role in the development of the atom bomb, and by their romantic longing for each other.
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