I just finished Cormac McCarthy's recent book "The Passenger" One wonders if the 89 year shuffled through a career's worth of discarded characters, mix-taped them together with other bits he'd always meant to write about, while trying to answer the unanswerable why are we here? and what happens next? There are parts so grounded and simple like making a sandwich on a deserted (maybe) oil rig in a massive storm; gritty examinations despair alternately in a roach infested swampland trailer and a snow bound in an abandoned ranch house in Idaho; alternate sections flash back into the psychotic vaudeville daydreams of the sister, who commits suicide as we join the story. She and her brother, Bobby, bear the guilt of their father, one of the Atomic bomb scientists. Bobby is a salvage diver, race car driver, friend of eccentrics, with a mystery to solve which includes his being hounded by Mr. Smith-like government officials for an unknown crime. Kennedy's assassination, particle physics, high speed cross country road trips, navel gazing, natural history, fantastic food, treasure hunts, mountains, shorelines, plane crashes... whew. The writing is as rich, sticky, startling, mucky, murky, and haunted as the story. As weird as it was, as unsettling, and at times wondering if it would pay off in the end (and I'm not sure it did) I can see reading it again.