Tag: Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy-Book

From a Google image Search – Alta Journal

Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy is so immersive; it’s like having a conversation with that person you could talk to all night. It’s one of those conversations that discusses little that is trivial. It goes deep and explores the human condition, the universe, the meaning of life, the nature of families and love. Stella Maris – could that translate to sea of stars? Apparently, it refers to a saint called star of the sea. Stella Maris in this case is the name of the fictional mental institution that Alicia Western has checked herself into as the novel begins. 

Alicia is a genius who began college in her early teens. Her parents worked for the Manhattan Project and moved with it to Oak Ridge Tennessee. They helped produce the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Her father was a physicist and her mother worked in a factory setting to separate U235 from U238.  There is guilt, lots of guilt. Alicia’s genius is in mathematics. Apparently true genius only occurs among mathematicians. 

Why did I so enjoy reading a book that I can’t pretend to totally comprehend? It made me feel both brilliant and sadly lacking in intellect at one and the same time. The names of famous physicists and mathematicians offer a fair bibliography of the work in these fields. 

Can mathematics solve the riddle of life and the universe? Does the pursuit of answers drive Alicia’s insanity, or just complicate it? It seems as if she was born to contribute to and expand on the work that comprises the field of math, but then why is she also born with a gene for schizophrenia and probably autism?

She spends her life in rare libraries and esoteric pursuits when her demons leave her periodically alone. She has no friends. She computes in notebook after notebook and in her mind when no paper is available. These are the things she discusses with her therapist, who seems able to follow her intellectually, although not mathematically. Having worked my way through advanced algebra with great difficulty, it is hard for me to imagine how math leads to so much philosophy but there it is, and its deep. You won’t like her conclusions about “life, the universe, and everything” as Douglas Adams put it, so I won’t tell you that part.

Alicia has a brother, Bobbie Western. He is the subject of the first book in this series (The Passenger). I believe that it helps to read them in order. Bobbie could not follow his sister to the heights (or depths) of her mathematical pursuits, so he studied physics and threw it all over for speed. He became a race car driver. 

Alicia is in love with her brother, despite society’s biological taboo against incest. He is the only one who understands her and loves her. He seems to also be in love with his sister, but he will not break the taboo on sexual intercourse. His sister’s broken heart contributes to her psychological burdens and to her worldview. 

If Cormac McCarthy is having his midnight conversation with his readers, which I think he is, then these books show unplumbed depths. But I warn you, at 89 his own worldview is perhaps not one that is designed to cheer you up, or even wake you up, as all human efforts seem to lead us to conclude that there is no powerful being or force watching out for us puny humans. I would still love to read both books, The Passenger and Stella Maris all over again and if I have the time I will. Is it that one book to take with you to a desert island? Not unless you also bring a math tutor. However, you can grasp the gist of this book without doing the math.

The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy – Book

Has Cormac McCarthy written the American Ulysses as per James Joyce? That’s the way The Passenger struck me, especially after the Thalidomide Kid and his cohorts finished their sad side show in the attic bedroom of Alicia Western. 

It’s the male cast of characters and the vicinity to water that brings to mind the guys who spend the day together in Joyce’s novel with all it’s classical references. Here the references are not at all classical but are certainly in the tragic style of many classics. In The Passenger we have Bobby Western, Oiler, Red, the pretentious Long One-John Sheddan, Darling Dave, Brat, Count Seals. Most of these men we meet in a bar and never hear from again. Bobby is my candidate for the new Leopold Bloom. Western has just come from a dive to check into a plane reported to have landed in waters near New Orleans. It’s a mystery which I cannot tell you about but just completing this dive job changes Western’s life forever.

Alicia and Bobby are brother and sister, and rumor has it that they were in an incestuous relationship, which may have just been sibling love beyond the understanding of this motley crew of men. They were born in Wartburg, Tennessee, near Oak Ridge. Yes, the Oak Ridge of building-atomic-bombs fame. (McCarthy ignores many rules of grammar and if he uses MS Word he must ignore lots of edits.)

“His father’s trade was the design and fabrication of enormous bombs for the purpose of incinerating whole citiesful of innocent people as they slept in their beds.”

Two very bright children who inherit the guilt of their father are bound to have complicated lives. Alicia loves math. Bobby begins with biology, cataloguing all the wildlife in the woods and streams near his childhood home but later decides that he loves physics because math is not his greatest strength, and because he thinks physics is more likely to unravel the secrets of the universe. You must forgive him. He was young. Both of their parents worked in a factory that enriched uranium. The father knew all the most famous physicists and so did Bobby and Alicia. Both parents died of cancer. Alicia inherits schizophrenia which ends her career as a brilliant mathematician. 

Bobby gives up physics to race Formula 2 cars in France and now has a metal plate in his head. Currently he’s a deep-sea diver. It turns out that there is a passenger missing. In fact, there are many references to passengers. Is that why men in suits are stalking Western? Is that why Oiler is dead?

These two unusual characters along with John Sheddan give the author’s prose scope to hallucinate, to offer a study in how schizophrenia can derail a life, to give us a history of physics in America, to call the roll of famous physicists, to explore the interior architecture of atoms and particles, and to take us through theories of physics up to and including string theory with some hints of the singularity. 

“Somewhere beyond that the installation at Oak Ridge for enriching uranium that had led his father here from Princeton in 1943 and where he’d met the beauty queen he would marry. Western fully understood that he owed his existence to Adolf Hitler. That the forces of history which had ushered his troubled life into the tapestry were those of Auschwitz and Hiroshima that sealed forever the fate of the West.” (pg 138)

While I see physics as a practical science leading to climate change and space exploration, Western seems to have arrived at a perception that physics is the branch of science that predicts extinction. 

John Sheddan, another product of the South, gives each member of the group a title. Bobby is the Squire. Sheddan pontificates,

“Flawed youths of course. To prefer a world of paper. Rejects. But we know another truth, don’t we Squire? And of course it’s true that any number of books were penned in lieu of burning down the world which was their author’s true desire. But the real question is are we few the last of a lineage? Will children yet to come harbor a longing for a thing they cannot even name? (pg. 115)

As the Thalidomide Kid, a hallucination Alicia invents to hang on to whatever sanity she can find, McCormack gets to say things like:

“Listen, Ducklescence, he whispered. You will never know what the world is made of. The only thing that’s certain is that it’s not made of the world. As you close upon some mathematical description of reality you can’t help but lose what is being described. Every inquiry displaces what is addressed. A moment in time is a fact, not a possibility. The world will take your life. But above all and lastly the world does not know that you are here. You think that you understand this. But you don’t. Not in your heart you don’t. If you did you would be terrified. And you’re not. Not yet. (pg. 109)

I loved this book so much that I read it twice and I might read it again, but it is not linear, and it is not cheerful. I cannot say if you will find that it speaks to you, but Cormac McCarthy had me at physics. Although after reading The Passenger I may have to give up believing that physics will unravel the secrets of life and the universe.