Appreciation: I thought I was done with Cormac McCarthy, but he wasn’t done with me

Cormac McCarthy refused to go on book tours and let his novels speak for themselves. I was looking for something to read at a bookshop in London’s Heathrow Airport last October when I spied Cormac McCarthy’s 2022 novel “The Passenger.” The early buzz about “The Passenger” was that it was a very good book — maybe even a great one — about a salvage diver named Bobby Western who makes a startling discovery inside a sunken jet. My start was “Child of God,” McCarthy’s third novel, about a serial killer in Sevier County, Tenn., which was about 200 miles from where I was going to school in southwest Virginia. “The Passenger’s” New Orleans setting and colorful characters recalled to mind Barry Gifford’s Southern Nights trilogy and its braided conspiracies reminded me of Thomas Pynchon. Just as I’d started my journey with McCarthy in close proximity to the novel’s setting, my smartphone told me I wasn’t all that far from where “The Passenger” ends.