Cormac McCarthy's Stella Maris

Saying goodbye to an American master.

I initially intended to write one big post about both The Passenger and Stella Maris. When I came to the end of the first of these paired novels, I decided that I had too much to say about it, so I wrote a post (which gives some helpful context to this piece) and then raced through the sequel, which takes the form of a series of conversations between Alicia Western, Bobby’s sister, and a psychiatrist.

Stella Maris is the kind of book that makes me feel inadequate, undereducated, adrift at sea. It’s basically my default feeling when I read Joyce or Pynchon and I felt it here quite a bit. When reading this sort of book I know that there’s probably something I should “get” and sometimes I think that I’ve got it, but between the allusions and the jokes and the language everything feels a bit slippery. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about, from the opening chapter, as Alicia Western explains why she’s lost faith in mathematics:

In this case it was led by a group of evil and aberrant and wholly malicious partial differential equations who had conspired to usurp their own reality from the questionable circuitry of its creator’s brain not unlike the rebellion which Milton describes and to fly their colors as an independent nation unaccountable to God or man alike. Something like that.

What are we to make of this passage? It’s lovely and weird and unique—I doubt anyone else has compared advanced mathematics and Paradise Lost—but it’s also opaque in that it raises more questions that it answers.

I think that McCarthy recognizes this, and so he inserts a foil for you, the reader, in the personage of Dr. Cohen, the shrink. Cohen is willing to admit that he doesn’t understand what Alicia is talking about and seems torn between trying to help her and writing a paper about her case (roughly equivalent to the reader’s feelings of sympathy for Alicia and trying to figure out the mysteries of these paired novels). Cohen’s fatal flaw is that unlike you, the reader, he hasn’t read The Passenger, which means that he’s missing huge pieces of the Alicia/Bobby backstory and has to coax them out of Alicia in their sessions together. The frustration of watching him go back over the same ground again and again is redeemed, at least for me, by seeing how artfully and persistently he works to get her to open up.

Prequels all share the same problem: how to create an compelling journey to a preordained destination. It’s the Anakin-Skywalker-has-to-become-Darth-Vader-so-how-do-we-make-it-interesting dilemma. While reading Stella Maris we already know that Dr. Cohen will not be saving Alicia, so the problem of the novel becomes something different: How does McCarthy make the end of her life meaningful, compelling, true?

One of the payoffs of Stella Maris is that McCarthy makes it possible to believe in Alicia’s sanity, despite all the evidence to the contrary. He allows her to present her case: her reality is no less real than yours or mine, no matter how strange or unsettling it might seem. Almost everything she says to Cohen returns to this central theme; it’s all over the quote I pulled above, from "usurp their own reality” to “an independent nation unaccountable to God or man alike.” Cohen thinks she’s yanking his chain on page ten—he responds by stating, “You think my questions are naive”—but by the end of the novel it’s hard not to believe in her commitment to her own reality, most memorably in a scene that I won’t spoil here but that involves the crystalline depths of Lake Tahoe.

I wasn’t sure that I needed to live in the universe of The Passenger for an entire second novel, but the resonance between the two books is really quite lovely, and I’m glad that I read them back-to-back. When Alicia says, “You really dont want to drown yourself in muddy water,” we remember Bobby’s descent into cloudy darkness early in The Passenger. The movement of the topics of Alicia’s sessions with Cohen, from father to mother to Bobby to the Thalidomide Kid, mimic Bobby’s orbits around New Orleans and his conversations along the way. Only at the very end of the second novel did I realize that together they replicate roughly the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. In Stella Maris Alicia believes that Bobby, comatose after a car racing crash, is dead; when The Passenger begins she has already taken her own life.

Cormac McCarthy died just months after the publication of Stella Maris, and it’s interesting to think of McCarthy working through his feelings about death through the vantage point of a 20-year-old savant. Somehow it all works, and I’m grateful that he gave us this pair of novels to close out a brilliant and strange literary career.