In McCarthy’s novels, people commit terrible acts—necrophilia, infanticide, cannibalism—and often with reason. His villains are symbols of that dark reason: the trio of swampland marauders in Outer Dark (1968), the dream-curdling scalp-hunter in Blood Meridian, the frigid bounty hunter stalking No Country. In The Passenger and Stella Maris, McCarthy tops this rap sheet with his worst crime yet: nuclear Armageddon. And the perp is one of American history’s finest minds, the porkpie-hatted architect of the atomic bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Though it isn’t Armageddon exactly. The Passenger is a historical novel set in 1980, and the world is still very much alive. The mere possibility of apocalypse by human means is crime enough. Throughout the novel, Bobby Western, a 36-year-old salvage diver and racecar driver, is haunted by his upbringing near the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, and in Los Alamos, New Mexico, two places where his physicist father, a protégé of Oppenheimer, helped design the device that would devastate Hiroshima in 1945. As we trail Bobby through the American South, the Midwest, Mexico, and Europe, we see the deep unsettlement of the atomic era in the mounting mysteries of his life: freak accidents, disappearances, detectives. “Shit that makes no sense,” as Bobby’s friend puts it. Or as another explains: “My understanding of it is not what makes it so.”
Above all the book is haunted by the ambiguous past of Bobby’s late father, whose papers have suddenly disappeared. Apparently the subject of a high-level investigation, these missing documents tease Bobby with what he should have asked about the physicist in life, and what it is now too late to learn. (The Japanese novelist Kenzaburo Oe, who died just a few months before McCarthy, also depicted a lost trove of paternal papers in Death by Water, another novel of nuclear dread published toward the end a similarly unsparing career.) Near the end, Bobby imagines the 1945 Trinity Test in New Mexico, where the first atomic bomb was exploded:
Two. One. Zero. Then the sudden whited meridian. Out there the rocks dissolving into a slag that pooled over the melting sands of the desert. Small creatures crouched aghast in that sudden and unholy day and then were no more. What appeared to be some vast violetcolored creature rising up out of the earth where it had thought to sleep its deathless sleep and wait its hour of hours. . . .
His father. Who had created out of the absolute dust of the earth an evil sun by whose light men saw like some hideous adumbration of their own ends through cloth and flesh the bones in one another’s bodies.