Compared to previous works, Cormac McCarthy’s newest two-parter is frustratingly inaccessible
By Simona Zaunius
It was the middle of lecture last December, an early Wednesday morning. My eyelids felt as if they were being pulled down by a force three times the weight of gravity as I struggled to keep them open. In a desperate attempt to remain conscious, I checked my phone and noticed a text message from my mother; Cormac McCarthy had released a new novel, the first since his Pulitzer-Prize winning The Road 16 years ago. All of a sudden, I was wide awake. Ever since I’d read No Country for Old Men at 15 (after watching the film in a wisdom-tooth-drug induced haze) I’ve voraciously consumed McCarthy’s novels, hungry for the deep gravity, the capability of his metaphors, the ever-changing insights into humanity and God. His ability to craft such profound pieces of art has rightly earned him the grand title of one of America’s greatest modern authors. When lecture finally ended, I raced to the closest Indigo and without hesitation, spent a pretty penny on The Passenger.
I read the inner sleeve of the cover on my way home:
“A collateral witness to machinations that can only bring him harm, Western is shadowed in body and spirit–by men with badges; by the ghost of his father, an inventor of the bomb that melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima; and by his sister, the love and ruin of his soul.”
I suppressed a grin, imagining what earth-shattering insights my favorite author would reveal this time around. McCarthy’s bread and butter is tackling heavy themes and subjects: life and death, what lies at the core of humanity,the purpose of the universe. In No Country for Old Men, it was the relentlessness of evil and the indifference of a higher power (if such a power even exists). In The Road,it was the indomitable human spirit in the most horrific and hopeless of circumstances. In Blood Meridian, or An Evening Redness in the West, he explored some of the most extreme depravity and how it is irrevocably tied to what makes us human. Grand themes aside, his canon contained some of the most gorgeous prose I had ever come across. Therefore, the summary of The Passenger seemed full of promise. As I poured through the book and its companion novel, Stella Maris, however, all I found was an inaccessible and exasperating reading experience which bludgeoned me over the head with McCarthy’s personal philosophies while lacking a cohesive or interesting narrative.
The novel begins with protagonist Bobby Western on a diving mission to investigate a plane wreck in the ocean, where he discovers the plane’s black box and a passenger have disappeared. A decently captivating exposition in which I became quickly invested. Years after her suicide, Bobby still deeply mourns the death of of his sister Alicia. Their relationship, however, is quickly suggested to be more than the typical brotherly-sisterly feelings. Occasionally a chapter from his late sister’s perspective intersects Bobby’s story, a glimpse from the past where she deals with what seem to be a myriad of schizophrenic hallucinations ring-mastered by a flippered dwarf called “The Kid” (seemingly a reference to Blood Meridian’s protagonist, who is also only ever referred to as “the kid”). The novel began with bizarre and dark attributes full of promise, but as it progressed, was never able to fully captivate me.
Everything in The Passenger is just out of reach. Western has been arrested, is being pursued by government agents, but we do not know why. He spends a week on an oil rig where it becomes clear a dangerous presence is aboard, but we don’t find out what it is. He refuses to speak of his sister, holding onto the last letter she wrote him always but never opening it. The secrets and horrors of this novel are tucked away so deep into Western that no one is allowed a peek, not even the reader themselves.
The secrecy of The Passenger quickly becomes stale as you realize the answers to your questions will never come. The novel is pointedly focused on spending pages on Bobby’s conversations with friends within restaurants or bars. These make up around fifty percent of the novel. The friends are pretty much indistinguishable, serving as mouthpieces for McCarthy’s personal musings on mathematics, God, and suffering. Bobby mostly listens as these “conversations” go on for pages. I quickly felt myself becoming exasperated whenever Bobby would enter yet another restaurant and order yet another dish of lobster to share with a friend who would force me to endure yet another dissertation. But nothing was worse than the excruciatingly detailed explanations of Bobby’s salvage diving endeavors. Ever wondered exactly what equipment to use while replacing a leaking “run of old flage joints” in a river? Me neither.
The novel is strongest when it takes a break from conversation and nuts-and-bolts to remember the narrative McCarthy has put in place. There are quick flashes of intense emotions underneath Bobby’s stoic and passive demeanor. He remembers bursting into passionate tears in front of his sister. He remembers holding a bloody, deformed child in his hands. I found The Passenger bogged down by the drudgery of the story and lack of character progression, but these hints of something gleaming in the deep darkness kept me reading. Besides these brief moments, however, we do not break the surface of Bobby. Even the climax, an appearance in Western’s life one would never have expected, becomes strangely low on impact. The end of the novel feels frustratingly incomplete, from an author who I’d always felt made the pain of trudging through difficult passages worth it. The intriguing mystery posed in the beginning is never solved.
Western’s musings at the end of the novel are some of McCarthy’s darkest and most depressing outlooks on life; basically saying “All life is loss and all loss is eternal”. Moving, but not worth it. Blood Meridian, with a similarly dark (though significantly more violent) ending, feels cathartic and powerful after hundreds of pages of depravity. But The Passenger left me with the same feeling of exasperation that had plagued me for the majority of the book.
I withheld my judgment until Stella Maris was released a month later. I was still hopeful; the companion novel was poised to be entirely from the perspective of Bobby’s genius mathematician sister and her elusive memory. Perhaps as we learned more about her, pieces of the story would fall into place.
McCarthy gives us Alicia Western’s story via “transcripts'' of a few sessions with a doctor in a psychiatric ward. If I was hoping for a stronger sense of narrative in this novel, I was sorely disappointed. Plot is even more minimal compared to The Passenger, if existent at all. Alicia instead recounts the names of obscure philosophers and mathematicians as she monologues on her genius theories and pessimistic outlook on reality. “I don’t want to talk about my brother”, she begins, and for the majority of the book, she doesn’t. There are brief glimpses into Bobby and Alicia’s relationship, but it’s surprisingly shallow, mostly consisting of intense lust on a then-14-year-old-Alicia’s part. Mostly, she speaks on evil. And math. A lot.
In Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy strips any false pretenses of continuing or contextualizing a narrative and simply speaks through the mouthpiece of Alicia. The counselor is an afterthought, there to break up the laborious paragraphs with “Jesus” or “Sorry,” a flat wall for Alicia’s ideas to bounce off of as opposed to a character. In one of the more readable segments of Alicia’s musings, he denounces language as a form of understanding reality, seemingly unaware of the irony that that’s exactly what he has been doing his entire career.
The disappointments do not end there. McCarthy’s first venture writing a woman main character after a decades-long career proves fruitless, if not downright disturbing. Womanhood is explicitly addressed for about a paragraph, otherwise the only other indication we get of Alicia’s gender is her recantation of attempted assaults upon her, the lust other men have for her, and her own lust for her adult brother. She embodies the Madonna whore complex so intensely that it almost feels ironic. A young, gorgeous virgin who feels intense lust but has never succumbed to it, only dreamed of it. Did I mention she’s also smarter than any top mathematician in the world. The psychiatrist interviewing her obviously makes a pass at her. How could he resist?
After about 6 or 7 conversations between Alicia and her doctor, the novel ends. If you were looking for clarity, you might as well have just stopped at The Passenger. Stella Maris is less a novel and more a vehicle for more of McCarthy’s personal philosophies. “For a long time I’ve suspected that we might be simply incapable of imagining the epochal evils of which we stand rightly accused and I thought it at least a possibility that the structure of reality itself harbors something like the forms of which our sordid history is only a pale reflection,” Alicia remarks.
It was in Stella Maris that my disappointment became resolute and final. I usually adore McCarthy’s ability to weave a thought provoking narrative but in Stella Maris, he has given this up completely. Alicia (or rather, McCarthy)’s ramblings on Wittgenstein and topology are so profoundly uninteresting, they border on unreadable.
Yet one gets the sense it’s meant to be. In case you get frustrated with the abandonment of the plot points that strung you along in The Passenger, Alicia is quick to remind you that you cannot understand her because she exists in a completely different and elevated understanding of reality and mathematics. She continues to insist to her psychiatrist that she is on the “other side of the glass,” and scoffs at his attempt to connect to her. As we are on the receiving end of these monologues as much as the psychiatrist is, it feels like Stella Maris is saying that if you’re frustrated with these ideas it’s just because you don’t get it.
From what my feeble brain could comprehend of Alicia’s rants, at the age of 89 McCarthy thinks all is incomprehensible and unimaginable evil. But there were too many references to obscure mathematicians and philosophers for me to care. With a catalog of some of the greatest novels I have had the pleasure of reading, I was expecting a lot from The Passenger and Stella Maris. But its lack of coherent narrative and tendency to spit incomprehensible, mathematical gibberish left me frustrated and exhausted. Perhaps McCarthy has failed this time around in balancing a compelling story with his insights on human existence. Or perhaps I just don’t get it.
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