Cormac McCarthy’s “The Passenger”: A Review “He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.”
— Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger
Among the most interesting points to emerge from early reviews of Cormac McCarthy’s new novel The Passenger are unfavorable comparisons to Thomas Pynchon. For example, Laura Miller in Slate refers to “interludes [that] recall the most tiresome parts of Thomas Pynchon novels, all bad jokes and stupid music hall songs.”
But it’s a mistake to read Pynchon seriously. To enjoy Pynchon, one must studiously ignore every tendentious theory about the parallels between Gravity’s Rainbow...