The Half-Life of Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Fission

When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, my life became the stuff of a Cormac McCarthy novel. I was in Mariupol, Ukraine, a city I had reported from over the years. It is now a permanent set from The Road. The events to which I bore witness transpired in bone-struck Cormac Pentameter peppered with shocking hilarity and gutting one-liners. Part of me remains in that rubble. But I found deliverance in his latest novel, The Passenger, a prescient book about the Westerns, the haunted and brilliant children of a physicist who helped develop the first atomic bomb.