Cormac McCarthy's Take on JFK

The celebrated novelist delves into the causes of November 22.

Cormac McCarthy is the author of critically acclaimed novels such as The Road and No Country for Old Men, the latter of which became a taut Oscar-winning film in 2007. His latest book, The Passenger, opens with:

a plane crash involving a private jet, found nearly intact underwater in the Gulf of Mexico, with nine bodies inside. At the site, we meet Bobby Western, a salvage diver who has landed in New Orleans, not as a way station so much as a place of last resort. Bobby has a complicated history; his father was a physicist who worked with J. Robert Oppenheimer to develop the atomic bomb, and his younger sister Alicia (formerly Alice) is a schizophrenic mathematical savant with whom he may or may not be in love.

As Western seeks to elude unidentified government agents who seem to be tracking his every move, he turns for help to his lawyer, a man named Kline, who knows the underside of New Orleans. Over a languorous meal, Western questions him about the assassination of JFK and Kline responds with a digression about the events of November 1963 and the motive forces of American history, starting with a lecture on guns.

“You don’t believe that Oswald killed JFK?” Western asks.

“It s not a matter of belief,” Kline replies.