The American writer signed his first novel since “La Route” in 2008. He deployed a high energy, dark and mysterious story. Marie Darrieussecq read it for “MO12345lemonde des Books”.
By Marie Darrieussecq (Writer)
western. The hero is called Bobby Western. This diver in the name of cinema and West specializes in the exploration of wrecks. He is also a brother in love with his sister. She committed suicide. His hanged body, covered with frost, opens the passenger, the new novel by Cormac McCarthy. Ten years later, an airplane fell at sea. Bobby managed to enter it. The plane is intact, but a passenger is missing. Starts “an epidemic of mysteries”.
Brilliant physicist (it is family: his father, a Jew refugee in the United States, is one of the creators of the atomic bomb), Western does not reach the mathematical genius of his dead sister. Two things will always escape him: the “deep heart of the number” and the “soul of women”, not to mention the “female intuition” that Debbie pursues, his trans girlfriend. Western, however, has all the talents: women want it, he reads quantum physics in French, he knows how to choose a wine and use a gun, he rolls faster than everyone with his maserati, he is champion of Mourning as there is a fasting champion at Kafka. We can annoy his visionary wisdom on what our world will become – the action is located in 1980. And we do not escape some generalities in this beautiful novel of man which recomposes the atoms of the Gothic melodrama (the Folle in the attic, love brother-sister, the ghosts) with those of the American road trip (the cars, the marginalized, the immense space where the soul twists). But, at 89, Cormac McCarthy has the right to afford a superhero.
I hate that incest, a burning heart of the passenger, is romanticized to Faulkner. Bobby Western is a tortured and torturing brother, like Quentin in noise and fury (Gallimard, 1938), or Pierre at Melville (Pierre or Les Ambiguïties, 1852). But fiction has never killed anyone, and it is happy that in 2023 the characters of novel still have the right to have fantasies and to do illegal things. And I like the freedom with which McCarthy invents a non -history which allows him to make all his horses run: between a reflection on liberalism – “it is not by selling your time that you will become rich” – and another On ecology – “The Ivory Bec peak (…) has disappeared forever” – he writes a Treatise on the Bomb, a story of the Vietnam War, a love song with a feline race, a culinary guide From New Orleans, a theory on the assassination of Kennedy … I forget.
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