Should I Read It? Cormac McCarthy pens 2 new novels after 16-year hiatus

Day 610:05After 16 years, Pulitzer winner Cormac McCarthy returns with two new novels – but should you read them?

To some it's being described as a worldwide literary event. After a 16-year hiatus, Cormac McCarthy has published a pair of new interconnected novels: The Passenger released in late October, and Stella Maris coming out this December. 

The 89-year-old American author and playwright is best known for books such as All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men and The Road — all of which were adapted into feature films. The Road also earned McCarthy a Pulitzer Prize for fiction. 

But after such a long wait, should you make the time to read his latest two?

Only if you're already a big fan of all his work, says Day 6 book columnist Becky Toyne.

"There are a few people who will love them, but most people would just say, 'this is too much like hard work,'" said Toyne. "I'm glad that I've read them, and that I can talk about them, but I struggle to imagine myself buying this for anyone for Christmas."

Toyne spoke with CBC Radio's Day 6 host Brent Bambury about McCarthy's new novels. Here's part of their conversation.

The Passenger begins with this compelling description of Bobby Western, the main character. He's going on a salvage dive for a sunken plane. But something isn't right. The plane is intact. The black box is missing. One of the passengers is also gone. What happens next? 

It sounds like a good thriller, doesn't it? Sounds like a really thrilling opening. And the scene where Bobby goes down into the plane is brilliant. It is so captivating. You are in the murky depths and it gets creepy and you're desperate to know what happens next. 

You'll continue to be desperate to know what happens next for the rest of the book, because it starts with the promise of a thriller — and it doesn't continue to be a thriller. 

Instead of being a story about that plane crash and the mystery around the passenger, it becomes a story about Bobby Western and his sister Alicia. 

That might be a disappointment unless the characters are extremely compelling. Is that the case? 

Bobby and Alicia [are] brother and sister. They are the children of a nuclear physicist who was responsible for splitting the atom. 

The two novels are set sort of in the '70s and '80s. Bobby is very, very smart. He's a loner. Alisha is a math genius and is so intelligent that she struggles to find anyone else that she can even have a conversation with, which has caused her to have mental health problems. 

Were you drawn into these characters? Did it make up for the fact that the mystery isn't paid off? 

For me, it didn't. I think that the book began with this promise of a thriller that ultimately sort of felt like a bit of a tease because we never got to find out what was happening. It was always just out of reach. 

The characters themselves had a lot of stuff that was interesting about them. One really important thing that I forgot to mention is that Bobby and his sister are passionately in love with one another, and we never get the sense whether this was consummated or not. So, that sort of murky idea is also hanging over both of the novels. 

They're complicated people with a sort of dark past and personal trauma and complicated relationship to one another.

The Passenger really sort of takes place as a series of set pieces. 

In these set pieces there are a series of dialogues and a series of one-on-one conversations with different, strange, interesting characters about the conspiracy theory around the assassination of JFK and around the atomic bomb. 

There's a scene where Bobby digs for gold, which he finds in the basement of his grandmother's sort-of condemned house. There are all of these really great set pieces, which individually are often quite wonderful to read, because the sentences that Cormac McCarthy puts together, and strings together, are wonderful.

But as a novel, they feel quite disjointed. And there's no plot. It is a series of set pieces. 

Does McCarthy still write eschewing punctuation? 

He does. And I don't like it. I mean, he's talked about that and said that he does it because he doesn't like clutter on the page. But, you know, there's a reason for apostrophes and things like that. 

To me, I found it distracting and that bothered me as well. When you're sort of trying to get immersed in the plotless fiction, it's distracted with the absence of important punctuation that helps with the flow of your reading. 

So what did you like about The Passenger? 

I think that the mood of it was nice. There were scenes that I really enjoyed reading. 

But ... I put this book down when I was about halfway through reading it and didn't pick it up again for another five days. And I found it really hard to get back into it. 

This is a long novel. It's almost 400 pages and it is presented to you with the promise of a thriller. And it's not. 

Now, the second novel, Stella Maris. What can you tell us? 

It's being published six weeks after The Passenger. They're sibling novels, really. The Passenger prioritizes Bobby and Stella Maris prioritizes his sister, Alicia. 

I preferred Stella Maris.... It gives you insight into Alicia's side of the story and her perspective on some of those things about the atomic bomb and about the life that [she] and her brother have had. 

And the fact that they're in love with one another. It gives you different insight into that, but it is presented entirely as a series of dialogues between Alicia and her psychoanalyst. It is only dialogue.

It's just talking for almost 200 pages and sometimes about really deep things like string theory and complex mathematical theory that the majority of people who read this novel are never in a million years going to understand. But I found it really interesting to have that sort of insight. 

Alicia, as a character, doesn't come across as being this sort of fully fleshed-out, whole woman. But it works because she's so strange herself and her mind is sort of working on this completely different level, and she is talking about dark stuff as well. I found the setup of this was just this constant sort of rush of dialogue. It was like watching a play. 

The Passenger, Stella Maris. Should we read them? 

No. 

I know a few readers who would love these books, but I think it's a very specific list of people. 

If you were looking for something to do this weekend, I wouldn't say, "You know what? Go and do one of those 1,000-piece impossible jigsaw puzzles." 

Produced by Laurie Allan. Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.