Episode 60: Riding Shotgun on THE PASSENGER with Lydia Cooper and Brent Cline

Oct 13, 2025

Guest

Brent Cline

Guest

Lydia Cooper

Lydia Cooper, a literature professor specializing in Native American texts and author of a significant McCarthy analysis, joins Brent Cline, an expert on disability representations in literature and McCarthy critic. They dive deep into The Passenger, exploring its complex themes of grief, quantum entanglement, and moral ambiguity. They debate the plot's challenges, the richness of sibling relationships, and the philosophical implications of characters' choices. Through an intricate discussion, they highlight McCarthy's stylistic evolution and the novel's profound social commentary.

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INSIGHT

Long Gestation Explains The Novel’s Swerves

The Passenger grew over decades from drafts in the 1980s into a sprawling, swerve-filled novel rather than a tight potboiler.
That long gestation explains its hybrid style mixing thriller, metaphysics, and fragmented narrative.

ANECDOTE

Early Rumor Of A Diver Came True

Scott recounts early rumors that McCarthy's next book would feature a deep-sea diver in New Orleans, which later proved uncannily accurate.
That anecdote shows McCarthy's long, porous creative process across decades.

INSIGHT

Names Work As Thematic Signifiers

McCarthy uses Bob and Alice as physics signifiers linking the sibling pair to quantum entanglement metaphors.
The Western surname evokes a civilizational critique about nuclear age guilt and cultural collapse.

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For the podcast's 60th episode we are finally able to develop a lengthy and thorough discussion of The Passenger, McCarthy's penultimate novel from 2022. I'm joined by two returning guests of the podcast: Dr. Lydia Cooper is a professor of American literature and director of the core curriculum at Seattle University. Her specializations include Native American literature, Western and southwestern literature, and gender studies, and of course Cormac McCarthy. Her most recent book is Cormac McCarthy: A Complexity Theory of Literature, published by Manchester University Press. Other books includes Masculinities in Literature of the American West, and No More Heroes: Narrative Perspective and Morality in the Novels, those novels being the books of Cormac McCarthy. Her work on McCarthy and on other modern and contemporary American and Native American writers has appeared in numerous academic journals such as Studies in the Novel, Studies in American Indian Literature, and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment . She is the Vice President of the McCarthy Society.

Also returning is Dr. Brent Cline. He is an associate professor of English at Hillsdale College. He earned his PhD at Western Michigan University, where his dissertation focused on representations of mental disability and the modern novel. He has published articles and chapters involving disability on Walker Percy, James Agee, and Daniel Keyes. His review of The Passenger/Stella Maris was published with The University Bookman. His article on The Mexican Revolution and All the Pretty Horses was published recently in the CMJ.

Corrections: I refer a few times to the siblings' grandmother and McCarthy's stretch regarding her ethnicity. It should be their great grandmother. Additionally, in the closing pages of the novels Bobby is not on Ibiza as we state but the nearby small island of Formentera, part of the same archipelago.

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Starting in spring of 2023, the podcast began accepting minor sponsorship offers to offset the costs of the podcast. This may cause a mild disconnect in earlier podcasts where the host asks for patrons in lieu of sponsorships. But if we compare it to a very large and naked bald man in the middle of the desert who leads you to an extinct volcano to create gunpowder, it seems pretty minor...