A Conversation with the Thalidomide Kid
The following review is part of RealClear Books and Culture's symposium on Cormac McCarthy's 'The Passenger.'
The temptation is to shut one’s eyes and throw a cloak over Noah’s nakedness,” the reviewer said. “Play the dutiful son to one of America’s greatest novelists.”
They sat in the diner’s only corner booth. The reviewer was drinking black coffee. The Thalidomide Kid hadn’t touched his fish-and-chips, claiming it smelled of mercury.
“Jesus,” spat the Kid. “Don’t get biblical this early in the morning.”
“You mean late afternoon.”
“It could be three seconds till midnight on the Doomsday Clock and I’d still say kick the false gravitas. Anyway, didn’t Ham bugger his dad? Isn’t that how the story goes once you scrape off the euphemisms?”
“I wouldn’t know about that. You’re obsessed with incest.”
“I accept no responsibility for my fixations. I didn’t write them. I chose them as much as I chose these selkie fucks.” He leaned forward in the booth and shook his flippers and the warm light of the overhead Edison bulb glinted off the small thumbnail sunk without purpose in the otarine flesh. Beneath him the spiderwebbed vinyl coating of the cushions creaked. “I’ll tell you something. Just because The Road made you cry at just the right time in your life doesn’t mean you owe this guy anything. Be brutal. Unleash your contumely. It’s not like he’ll ever read it. Not where he is.”
“And where is that?”
“Hell if I know.”
“You are the single worst, most off-putting, narratively useless character he has ever written,” the reviewer said looking at the scarified divots in the Kid’s bald head. “And you look like the fruit of whatever unholy union transpired in the outhouse between the Judge and that other Kid at the end of Blood Meridian. You are an insufferable abortion of a character foil.”
“Jesus. This is what I get for encouraging a little disinhibition?”
“You’re what we all get for some editor at Knopf not encouraging McCarthy to kill his darlings. Your every appearance could be cut and the novel would be no worse for it. Ditto for every chapter from Alicia’s viewpoint. Madness in literature should be fascinating and frightening. Hers is neither.”
“You don’t find a ghostly troupe of misshapen Vaudevillians haunting the mind of a suicidal girl even a little frightening? Not even the thing on the windowsill? Its elf’s ears and eyes cold as stone taws in the mercury yardlight raw upon the glass. Its scrannel neck. Its lidless gaze. That didn’t give you even a mild chill?”
“No. She’s dead in the first scene. There are zero stakes. She only matters because of what she means to her brother, Bobby Western.”
“But the nebulousness. The paranoia—”
“Mostly falls flat amidst purposeless digressions on the Kennedy assassination and quantum physics. McCarthy is a great writer of villains. Give me the Judge. Or Chigurh. Don’t give me the fucking IRS.”
“What about the humor? You’ve got to at least grant me my wit. My recusant repartee.”
“You never once made me laugh. Or even smile. The novel is full of humor. But it all belongs to John Sheddan and the other lowlife barflies who seem to exist only to leaven Western’s morosity. John is the one truly excellent character in The Passenger. He reminds me of Buck Mulligan in Ulysses—if Buck had secretly possessed a soul.”
The Kid sank in his seat and his face was further deformed by exhaustion and mock-hurt. “When I appear to him on the beach, late in the story, during his metaphorical descent into the land of the dead, don’t tell me that didn’t move you. Me, a figment of his dead sister’s imagination, figured before him against the gray waves, our exchange every bit as portentous and sorrowful as befits such a setting. Didn’t that move you?”
“Almost.”
“Then what did? Surely something in those three hundred and eighty-three minimally punctuated pages got to you. Reminded you of the McCarthy of old.”
“Of course,” said the reviewer. “Western is a truly haunted man. There’s poetry in his wounds. And he’s not just haunted by his sister’s absence or his lust for her or by the sin of his father’s atomic tinkering. As a true son of the American South, he’s Christ-haunted, despite being Jewish, apparently. The scene where he ventures into a cathedral and thinks of his father and Hiroshima rivals some of the best McCarthy has written. The phantasmagoria of the post-bomb waste is utterly unsettling. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. My God. The passage is radiant with horror. And the ending sequence is, like nearly all of McCarthy’s endings, exquisitely incantatory. A ritual, hypnotic imprinting of hope and futurity through brute force of language despite their seeming impossibility at the level of narrative. I read that and thought, ‘Ah, now here he is, here’s the McCarthy I love.’ Then it was over and I shut the book and I found that I was for the first time truly dissatisfied with something he had written.”
“You didn’t even care to know who the ‘passenger’ was? You weren’t curious as to why ‘they’ decided to destroy Western’s life, forcing him into exile?” The Kid was beginning to look smug.
“I’ll admit the underwater sequence was captivating and wonderfully eerie. The concentration of detail was impressive. All that human hair drifting in the dark of the fuselage. The apparent absence of a single passenger signaling the shape of the plot to come. He set up the mystery quite well. The problem is that he didn’t care to follow through on it. It all feels like a gag. The question—Who dunnit to whom?— is answered by Nietzsche’s mad prophet swinging his lantern in your face and telling you that if God isn’t dead then he’s up to some shit.”
“Shit like sending your ass to Ibiza and making sure you’re too hung up on your dead mathematician sister to enjoy any of the women in paradise?”
“Shit precisely like that,” said the reviewer. “But, to be fair to God, he does continue to bless Western with profound conversation partners. Everywhere he goes, from New Orleans to Knoxville to Ibiza, he manages to find people who all talk exactly like Cormac McCarthy writes. And if that’s not a blessing, I don’t know what is.”
Justin Lee is associate editor at First Things.
Sam Buntz's contribution to the symposium: Riding Shotgun to the End of the World | RealClearBooks
Titus Techera's contribution to the symposium: The Rugged Individualism of Cormac McCarthy | RealClearBooks
