“If it doesn’t involve life or death… it’s not interesting” – Cormac McCarthy in Rolling Stone
I was introduced to Cormac McCarthy several years ago when I read perhaps the most violent book ever written, Blood Meridian (This immediately followed my trek through David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a literary whiplash from which I may never recover). Having been made sufficiently nauseous by the bloodshed in Blood Meridian, but awed by McCarthy’s signature writing style, sparse but biblical, I picked up what was then McCarthy’s most recent novel The Road. It affected me in ways that I was not prepared for.
The Road chronicles a father and his young son’s journey by foot through a post-apocalyptic American wasteland. The exact cause of the apocalypse is not revealed, you are free to map on whatever scenario you think most likely, nuclear fallout, runaway AI, global warming. McCarthy has a way of keeping the source of evil hidden, lurking somewhere in the depths, a cavern, a basement, the abyss. But for all the ominous tension, terror and depravity are presented plainly and without reservation. Whatever the source, the event and its aftermath killed most people on earth. Those who survived are left to navigate a world in chaos. A place where there are fates worse than death. McCarthy said the idea for the novel came to him while he was staying in a hotel in El Paso with his son. He looked out the window of their room at the ridges above the city and imagined them on fire. As McCarthy’s narrator summarizes the subsequent break-down of society.
“The frailty of everything, revealed at last”
The Road is about what it means to be a father, and what is required of one. A theme that spoke to me particularly sharply having a young son of my own.[21] As I worked my way through McCarthy’s backlog, I noticed a new side of me emerging. I think about death more. I see more danger, long car rides worry me. I envision myself or my family mangled in an accident. Sometimes when I’m reading the news at night I look out the window and imagine the ridges overlooking my town on fire. I check in on my son while he’s sleeping more often than I care to admit.
The Road was published in 2008. It won the Pulitzer Prize and was made into a motion picture starring Vigo Mortensen. Oprah included it in her book club. Then nothing from McCarthy for a long time.
THE PASSENGER AND STELLA MARIS
Having been smitten by McCarthy’s novels, I was excited and a bit weary when I heard that he was breaking his long silence to publish an (almost surely) final work. Reading McCarthy can be like peering into the void. What dark truth about nature, humanity, myself will I be forced to grapple with this time? The man who so skillfully writes about death, now at 89 and nearing his own, will give us one more glimpse into the abyss.
Convincing people that they should read McCarthy is a strange task. “Do you sort of… like the essence of beautiful dread?” “You get this kind of queasy feeling that he gets a lot right about human nature, and the cold indifference of the universe. It’s great!” “If feeling uncomfortable doesn’t have much to recommend it, you may benefit from the sense that he’s preparing us for something. Like a prophet…which is terrifying. In a good way though. Trust me.”
Perhaps because of his particular writing style[22], the weightiness of his subject matter, or his fondness for privacy, Cormac McCarthy is considered by many to be an almost mythical being. The anticipation for the release of this latest work, in two parts The Passenger published October 2022 and its coda Stella Maris published a month later, were going to be regarded by McCarthy fanatics like me as almost proclamations from on high. What we received was a bit surprising.
Set in 1980’s New Orleans, The Passenger follows Robert “Bobby” Western, a deep water diver living in the French Quarter. The story bounces around from bar to restaurant to job site listening in on Bobby’s conversations with his cadre of colorful friends and acquaintances. The plot is jaunty by McCarthy’s standards, if only because many of the characters are interesting and lively and not dying horrible deaths every few pages. There’s a well-educated British cad, a transwoman, a Vietnam veteran, and a mob-adjacent lawyer. The story is propelled along by a mystery, Bobby and a co-worker are hired on a dive to investigate a small charter plane crash in the Gulf of Mexico. When underwater, they discover that a passenger is missing from the manifest, and this information seems to get them in trouble with some unknown shadowy powers. Bobby finds himself being followed. Eventually his bank accounts are frozen and his co-worker dies under mysterious circumstances[23]. It becomes apparent that Bobby is very intelligent, likely in the top 0.1% of IQ distribution. He studied physics at CalTech before dropping out to race Formula 2 cars in Europe. His intellect is on display through his many conversations with his friends who can best be described as the underbelly of 1980’s New Orleans. So why is this brilliant man diving for scrap metal and living in a room above a bar on Bourbon Street? We learn that Bobby had a younger sister, Alicia, who committed suicide several years back. In the book's opening scene a hunter comes across her body in a snowy field. Bobby cared for her deeply[24] and feels guilty for failing to save her. If Bobby is in the top 0.1% of IQ distribution, Alicia was in the top 0.0001%. A true math savant of once in a generation talent. Through flashbacks, we learn she suffered from schizophrenia and was plagued by hallucinations. The Passenger is interspersed with passages of Alicia interacting with a reoccurring vision she calls The Thalidomide Kid. We also learn that Bobby and Alicia are the children of a renowned physicist who worked side by side with Oppenheimer & company in developing the atomic bomb.
McCarthy’s interest in physics, quantum mechanics, and advanced mathematics is part of his mystique. He claims that he prefers the company of scientists to his fellow writers. At the Santa Fe Institute, where he serves as a lifetime board trustee, he has forged friendships with scientists and academics across many fields including the late Nobel Prize winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann[25]. In interviews, he has expressed his admiration for the scientific achievements of the 20th century and has displayed a broad knowledge of the ideas and theories involved. This fascination has rarely made its way explicitly into his writing. Although he often deals with the existential questions posed by theoretical physics, The Passenger and especially Stella Maris engage with the ideas head on. I was somewhat relieved when it became apparent that the plot of these novels was little more than a vehicle to let McCarthy exhaust his vast reservoir of knowledge in these areas. This is more in line with what I had hoped for these final works of America’s greatest living novelist. In these pages the ideas of Grothendieck, Von Neumann, Gödel, Dirac and many others are mulled over. They become second hand characters in the story. Bobby’s friends know about his father, now deceased, and often ask him questions about his work on the bomb. Bobby recounts anecdotes passed down from his father, and the historical drama of competing factions and theories in the field of particle physics becomes almost a stand-alone subplot of the larger story.
Stella Maris, which is set 10 years prior to the events of The Passenger, consists entirely of the transcription of several long conversations between Alicia Western and a psychiatrist at the titular Stella Maris Facility for Psychiatric Medical Patients. The coda fills in some narrative gaps left open in “The Passenger” and illuminates Alicia as a character in full. If The Passenger deals with physics, Stella Maris is all about mathematics, the more fundamental discipline. Alicia is smart enough to have read and comprehended, and sometimes collaborated with the world’s leading mathematicians. In the conversations, she overpowers the psychiatrist trying to help her. He seems to genuinely want to help, but mostly is just trying to hang on for dear life in the conversations. McCarthy has an obvious respect for people of high intelligence, and Alicia’s intellectual ability ultimately leads her to question reality and the benefit of existing at all. You really feel for her plight, even if the insight her intelligence affords is unattainable for us. At times, she attempts to explain to the psychiatrist some of the paradoxes and implications of advanced mathematical theory, something he (along with almost everyone else) are incapable of comprehending. She is both awed by the beauty of mathematics and terrified by it. She also recounts in detail various plans she has had for killing herself. Alicia understands, and by the events of The Passenger has convinced Bobby that the universe ultimately exists to destroy everything in it. Alicia remarks at one point
“I no longer have an opinion about reality. I used to. Now I don’t. The first rule of the world is that everything vanishes forever. To the extent that you refuse to accept that then you are living in a fantasy”
The idea of the universe as a maw erasing everything in its path is a recurring theme, and sobering to think about in terms of McCarthy’s advanced age. Alicia is transfixed by the beauty of mathematics, something which she says occurs in the subconscious, but is frustrated by her inability, and by extension everyone’s inability to truly understand the universe. Mathematics is foundational and infinite and ultimately unknowable fully. Alicia on mathematical truths.
“There is nothing else that all men are compelled to agree upon, and when the last light in the last eye fades to black and takes all speculation with it forever I think it could even be that these truths will glow for just a moment in the final light. Before the dark and the cold claim everything”
McCarthy seems to be letting us know that he has used his final years searching for understanding, searching for clarity, and has come up empty handed. In fact, that the task is impossible. Now all that is left is to face the maw.
THE UH…THING ABOUT THESE BOOKS
Alicia is in love with her brother Bobby and Bobby is in love with Alicia.[26] It is the source of a lot of their anguish. Bobby feels shame and Alicia feels frustration at their inability to be together. McCarthy has never hesitated to present the world plainly as it is. They both share an uncommon intelligence which makes it difficult to relate to most other people and they share the guilt of having a father who helped bring the nuclear bomb into existence[27]. Alicia considers the societal restrictions that keep them apart arbitrary. Bobby, who is more grounded in society, ultimately rejects her. In light of this, his guilt over her suicide becomes a lot more complicated. The Passenger takes place roughly a decade after her death and Bobby still loves her and turns down all attempts by friends to set him up with other women. One thing that becomes apparent is that it must be very lonely being that smart. Alicia sometimes describes her experience growing up, her inability to fit in with other kids and the strangeness and fear with which her grandparents viewed her. For Alicia there are only a handful of people on the planet who can understand her. Her brother happens to be one of them. It’s an interesting choice for McCarthy to include this element, and how you decide to view it is sort of the question. If everything ultimately becomes nothing, why does it matter?
THE THALIDOMIDE KID
The Thalidomide[28] Kid or “The Kid” is a recurring hallucination that afflicts Alicia. He is a dwarf-like character with flippers for arms. The Kid along with his band of circus performers visit Alicia regularly beginning at age 12. Long passages of The Passenger are dedicated to Alicia’s dialogue with the Kid. He mainly bothers her in her room while she is working on a proof or trying to sleep. The Kid is sort of a gregarious and playful carnival barker and much of their dialogue is kind of just goofy. I admit that I was disappointed when I arrived at another passage featuring the Thalidomide Kid. I’m not sure I “got it”. In Stella Maris Alicia explains to the psychiatrist that she has no reason to believe that the Kid is any less real than she is. She reasons that there is no way that he came from her mind, so then where did he come from? What makes herself more real than he? Maybe a more acute reader will be able to pull more from the Thalidomide Kid than I managed.
CONCLUSION
If two guys in a bar talking about how Stueckelberg was never given proper attribution for the vector boson exchange model is something that piques your interest, then you’re probably the type of person who will enjoy these books. The story is gripping enough but serves as little more than a framework for McCarthy to share with us what he’s been thinking about for the last 16 years. I enjoyed reading the books and would probably benefit from a re-read. I also would probably benefit from a deeper understanding of quantum theory and mathematics (I guess I’ll get right on that). There is probably a lot of fruit in that regard that I left on the tree in my reading. What is impossible to miss however is McCarthy’s patented tour-de-force passages, which are present throughout. The kind of passages where McCarthy works himself into a lather and really thunders forth. The kind that makes you stop in your tracks and think “Whoa. What the hell did I just read?” There is gravity in his words. And terror. And beauty.
With AI and nuclear doomsday scenarios pushing to the forefront of our daily lives, McCarthy is well positioned as a literary figure to articulate and attempt to answer many of the questions that arise. The answers he offers are not always comforting. Why should they be? One can’t help but conflate McCarthy meditating on his impending demise with ourselves (humanity) doing the same. Bobby and Alicia’s last name “Western” is no accident. They represent the modern western world, immensely talented but morally and spiritually adrift and inheritors of a scientific birthright that is sure to be their downfall. People have often looked to the humanities for comfort when the events of the world turn dark. That’s not exactly what’s happening here. McCarthy is not one to sugarcoat. If we feel powerless in the face of potentially civilization-ending forces, McCarthy offers not comfort but confirmation. The final words of Stella Maris, and likely McCarthy’s final published words are shared between the psychiatrist and Alicia.
“I think our time is up.
I know. Hold my hand.
Hold your hand?
Yes. I want you to.
All right. Why?
Because that’s what people do when they’re waiting for the end of something”