Cormac McCarthy, The Passenger

Here is one way to regard this new book about which no two critics can seem to agree. After a pair of fast-paced screenplay-novels (Cities of the Plain, No Country for Old Men) and a crowd-pleasing Oprah-crowned sentimental bestseller (The Road), not to mention a somewhat sermonic play (The Sunset Limited) and a screenplay proper (for Ridley Scott’s stylish and underrated thriller The Counsellor), Cormac McCarthy has finally returned to the manner of The Crossing, itself something of a throwback to earlier novels like The Orchard Keeper and Suttree: a mute, mysterious, intimidating, crowd-repelling late-modernist edifice, a dark monolith owing as much or more to Beckett as to Faulkner, like some rune-inscribed obelisk the rider chances upon amid dunes or a sunken freight whose purpose no diver can divine amid the night-blue deeps.