Major publishing events are rare in our day and age of irreconcilable cultural chasms between left and right. Not many living American writers compel something resembling a consensus on their greatness anymore, and those that do tend to be very old. Thomas Pynchon is one. Cormac McCarthy, now eighty-nine-years old, is another. And he has just published two new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, an occurrence of which the reading public should take heed.
