STELLA MARIS - CORMAC MCCARTHY

Perhaps the last McCarthy book we’ll ever get. Then man is in his mid-80’s so it doesn’t seem a stretch to theorize that this is the last piece of prose we’ll get, at least until his estate publishes all of his unfinished stuff when he passes. It’s fitting then that the last line of the book comes after a character asks another to hold her hand, saying, “because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something.” Let me back up, that line is spoken by one of the books two characters, Alicia Western, who we were introduced to, via flashbacks, in The Passenger. By the time of the events in The Passenger, Alicia has killed herself and the book mostly deals with how her brother, Bobby, deals with his grief surrounding her death. In this book, Bobby is in a coma and Alicia thinks he is going to die. She is twenty and has checked herself into a mental hospital in Wisconsin. The book could easily be a play, there is nothing in it but 7 long dialogues between her and Dr. Cohen, her psychiatrist. There’s no exposition or descriptions or even quotation marks, just the back and forth dialogue, and even that is one-sided, it’s mostly Alicia ranting. She’s a math genius and profoundly depressed and disturbed. McCarthy has been spending the last decade plus of his life at the Santa Fe institute, talking with mathematicians and it shows. She goes on and on about the nature of math, and name-drops dozens of mathematicians, most of whom (outside of Gӧdel, Whitehead and Russell) were unfamiliar to me. She talks about wanting to die and elaborates her fantasies about the ways in which she’s planned her death. We know, from the Passenger, that she does end up killing herself, if I’ve got the timeline right, it would have been shortly after the events of this book, so these sections are given more pathos and sorrow. The most shocking part is the graphic nature of her relationship with her brother. In The Passenger, it is made clear that Bobby loves Alicia, they make explicit that the love is very deep, perhaps too deep for a normal brother and sister, something on the edge of incest. This book goes much further. Alicia makes it quite clear she’s trying to fuck her brother, she wants to be, “entered like a cathedral” and has prolonged graphic dreams involving her “girljuice.” I’m not sure what to make of that part, I’m not sure what it adds to their relationship, especially since Bobby backs out. I suppose it’s supposed to make us feel bad for Alicia, since she’s got a sort of doomed love, but the incest taboo is pretty strong in most people (myself included) so it made her seem less pitable and more alien. It’s fascinating to see McCarthy write a woman, his books can be fairly criticized for being no-girls-allowed-Boyz-clubs, and he said in 2009 that he’s been planning on writing a woman for 50 years. It’s fascinating that his woman character is a sad genius that no one understands who doesn’t really exist in the world, she only talks with one doctor, and doesn’t have any recognizable desires, outside of her brother. It’s an intriguing dialogue but McCarthy seems afraid to really try to inhabit a female character. It’s certainly one big book, this and The Passenger, broken into two parts. Though I found The Passenger more interesting and think this book could have been interspersed into The Passenger to create one 500 page book that would have been excellent. There’s some interesting ideas in here about language and the subconscious, a theme of McCarthy’s, though now he’s on the Burroughs language-is-a-virus kick which is fascinating. As always the writing is beautiful and sad and haunting. I’d place this one book behind The Passenger and both of them together in the second tier of his writing.