30 Best Fiction Books to Read This Fall 2022

The cosmic struggle between desires—erotic, aspirational, spiritual—and stone-cold reality arcs through McCarthy’s lengthy, Nobel-worthy career. At 89, he’s still riffing, like a jazz virtuoso, on the American Nightmare, Faulkner’s mythmaking, and the cadences of Joyce. McCarthy’s flame burns bright and clear in two new works, his first since The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and an Oprah Book Club selection: The Passenger, wondrous in its architecture, and a companion piece, Stella Maris, a minimalist, edgy novella. He showcases a carnival of tormented souls, among them a Los Alamos scientist’s grown children—Alicia Western, a suicidal mathematics prodigy, and her older brother Bobby, a former physicist turned salvage diver—as well as a vaudevillian cast of schizophrenic hallucinations, including the emcee, known as the Thalidomide Kid, potty-mouthed, with flippers instead of hands. McCarthy toggles between books and across decades, sketching the contours of a love that dare not say its name. McCarthy’s art is transcendent even as it takes no prisoners, an achievement akin only to the oeuvres of his greatest peers, Toni Morrison and Philip Roth. He will endure.