A sunken wreck of a novel: Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger reviewed

Is Cormac McCarthy among the last generation of novelists to possess a Style? Of course all writers have a characteristic style, however unassuming; but not many these days have a Style in the grand manner, the sort that Kingsley Amis (I think writing about Nabokov) described as a high level of flutter and wow.

The great beasts of American literature have often aimed for prose that couldn’t be mistaken for anyone else’s – Hemingway, Faulkner, Bellow, Updike. Though there were always intensely mannered novelists in England, they had less of a heroically manly quality – Firbank, Wodehouse, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green. There are certainly novelists at work now with a beautiful command of style, such as Peter Carey or Colson Whitehead, but few for whom style is everything, and most, like McCarthy, are getting on a bit.