Review by Booklist Review
Bobby Western is a salvage diver afraid of the deep. Once a physics prodigy, he was smart enough to know he wasn't smart enough, unlike his father, who helped Oppenheimer develop the atomic bomb. The real genius of the family, however, was Bobby's late sister, Alicia, a schizophrenic math wizard prone to hallucinations and madly in love with her brother. While working on a job involving a small plane crash, Bobby and his partner discover one of the passengers is missing, along with the black box. Bobby is intrigued by the mystery until he becomes the target of a shadowy investigation. Plot is secondary to McCarthy's expert exploration of each character's interiority, plumbing the depths of their subconscious. Each chapter begins with an italicized lead-in depicting one of Alicia's hallucinations, a chilling and masterly conceit. McCarthy also considers such topics as postwar physics, race cars, underwater salvage, and the JFK assassination that subtly deepen the enigmatic narrative. His prose frequently approaches the Shakespearean, ranging from droll humor to the rapid-fire spouting of quotable fecundity. Dialogues click into place like a finely tuned engine. McCarthy has somehow added a new register to his inimitable voice. Long ensconced in the literary firmament, McCarthy further bolsters his claim for the Mount Rushmore of the literary arts.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Excitement is running high for McCarthy's first novel since The Road (2006), and readers will also be on alert for a second, linked novel, Stella Maris, due in December.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
McCarthy returns 16 years after his Pulitzer-winning The Road with a rich story of an underachieving salvage diver in 1980 New Orleans, the first in a two-volume work. Bobby Western, son of a nuclear physicist who worked on the atomic bomb, is tasked with investigating a private plane crash in the Gulf. The plane's crew is dead, the black box is missing, and one passenger is unaccounted for. Soon, agents of the U.S. government begin to harass Western and his coworker, then this colleague turns up dead. This thriller narrative is intertwined with the story of Western's sister, Alicia, a mathematical genius who had schizophrenia and died by suicide. In flashbacks of Alicia's hallucinations, vaudevillian characters perform for her--most notably, a character named the Thalidomide Kid. Alicia and the Kid engage in numerous conversations about arcane philosophy, theology, and physics--staples of the philosopher-tramps, vagabonds, and sociopaths of McCarthy's canon, though their presence doesn't feel quite as thematically grounded as they do in his masterworks. Still, he dazzles with his descriptions of a beautifully broken New Orleans: "The rich moss and cellar smell of the city thick on the night air. A cold and skullcolored moon.... At times the city seemed older than Nineveh." The book's many pleasures will leave readers aching for the final installment. (Oct.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
In 1980, Bobby Western, a salvage diver, travels to Christian Pass, MS, to investigate an underwater plane crash. He soon discovers that the black box, the flight pilot's bag, and an unidentified passenger are missing. Bobby does not know what happened but nonetheless becomes the target of a federal investigation. Already haunted by his father, a physicist responsible for creating the nuclear bomb, and by the death of his sister Alicia, with whom he was in love, Bobby embarks on a quest across the United States to save his body and soul. McCarthy's (The Road) much-anticipated novel is a new American epic. His elegant prose piercingly reveals the characters' pain as they wrestle with questions of morality, madness, sin, and science. The audio is narrated in alternating sections by MacLeod Andrews, who gives voice to Bobby, and Julia Whelan, who reveals Alicia's point of view. Their luminous performances lay bare the agony and hope that each character holds within, while also helping listeners to distinguish between shifting timelines. McCarthy fans may recognize the author's recurring themes, as well as astute observations about modern life. VERDICT This latest from literary giant McCarthy lives up to the hype and is a must-add to any collection.--Elyssa Everling
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A beguiling, surpassingly strange novel by the renowned--and decidedly idiosyncratic--author of Blood Meridian (1982) and The Road (2006). "He's in love with his sister and she's dead." He is Bobby Western, as described by college friend and counterfeiter John Sheddan. Western doesn't much like the murky depths, but he's taken a job as a salvage diver in the waters around New Orleans, where all kinds of strange things lie below the surface--including, at the beginning of McCarthy's looping saga, an airplane complete with nine bloated bodies: "The people sitting in their seats, their hair floating. Their mouths open, their eyes devoid of speculation." Ah, but there were supposed to be 10 aboard, and now mysterious agents are after Western, sure that he spirited away the 10th--or, failing that, some undisclosed treasure within the aircraft. Bobby is a mathematical genius, though less so than his sister, whom readers will learn more about in the companion novel, Stella Maris. Alicia, in the last year of her life, is in a distant asylum, while Western is evading those agents and pondering not just mathematical conundrums, but also a tortured personal history as the child of an atomic scientist who worked at Oak Ridge to build the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's all vintage McCarthy, if less bloody than much of his work: Having logged time among scientists as a trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, he's now more interested in darting quarks than exploding heads. Still, plenty of his trademark themes and techniques are in evidence, from conspiracy theories (Robert Kennedy had JFK killed?) and shocking behavior (incest being just one category) to flights of beautiful language, as with Bobby's closing valediction: "He knew that on the day of his death he would see her face and he could hope to carry that beauty into the darkness with him, the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue." Enigmatic, elegant, extraordinary: a welcome return after a too-long absence. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
