Passenger and Stella Maris
Most great
writers approach their golden years with such skill, discipline and so much to
say that they keep writing, just for fun of it, to tell great stories or to just show
off. Steinbeck did. Falkner did, Harrison did. Earnest Hemingway cold not and it drove him
to suicide. After critical success, and the confidence it
can bring, these writers unleash their formidable talents and just let it fly. The book or the story is just the structural vehicle
for the prose and the wisdom they have to share. The privilege of their success is to be able
to spin yarns of style and grace, unfettered by the pressure to produce and succeed.
Cormac McCarthy
wrote such epic early stories as Blood Meridian, The Road, No Country for
Old Men, and the All the Pretty Horses trilogy. His spare and poetic prose, without much punctuation,
can make a story out of nothing, but when he has a story to tell, watch out. You will want to keep reading for the zingers
on every page and paragraph. Hell, every
death dealing sentence he writes is a zinger, reminiscent of early Hemingway
and latter Falkner. This often makes his
classic literature seem subtle and sublime. The reading is almost
impressionistic, train of thought and better done in morning light since it is
too dense and dark to read at night. The
story is not that important, and it doesn’t matter what he writes, it is how he
writes it and what he says on, and in-between, every line.
Cormac did
some of his best writing in his last two books Passenger
and Stella Maris, that were released within six weeks of each
other in 2022 and before his death in 2023. They follow Bobby
and Alicia Western, two siblings whose father helped develop the atomic bomb,
for better or worse. Bobby is the
tortured loner in Passenger, running from generational guilt and lovers loss Alicia is the
tormented but brilliant little sister staying voluntarily at the Stella Maris
mental institution. She is being
interviewed by her psychiatrist and her friendly hallucinations for the entire
second book, in a format that seems gimmicky at first, but genuine in the end.
McCarthy was
such a big book collector and hobby mathematician and physicist, mechanic and
biologist, that his characters are brilliant and troubled, intense and
thoughtful. Characters talk
inquisitively about Quantum Quarks, that are all energy but no mass, figuring
it out as they go along, and as Cormac writes it. He expounds knowingly on the
math and physics of the new science of Hawking and Heisenberg, Feynman and Einstein
with the practicality of Fermi and Oppenheimer.
The dialogue
is terse and tense, without the parenthetical he-said she-said
interruptions of punctuation and qualifiers. The conversation is snappy and smart, taut and
true, almost the way people wish they could really talk. But the discourse, unrestrained by
punctuation, is so easy to read that we assume these are all fast-paced
conversations without the natural pauses for thinking and emoting. Segments on science interconnect effortlessly
with nostalgic sections with grandma and grandpa, flirtatious scenes with a
waitress and transsexuals, that merge the initial scientific dissertation with
the real-people story.
We write
what we know, and everything is at least subconsciously autobiographical, so
what else could Cormac write. These
siblings share a guilt-ridden platonic love. Their care for each other unsuccessfully
nurtures beautiful Alicia through her hallucinations and suicide attempts. The hallucinations and fictional caricatures are
a little tiresome but the structural parts of these books is strong enough to
hold them up. The stories are bigger
than life and almost believable but the story telling is top shelf, out of this
world and neatly consistent with Cormac’s professional voice and artistic
touch. A philosopher recommended the
first book to me, a psychologist recommended the second. I will pass them on to my math, physics, psychology and writer friends. There is something for everyone. In the end, it is not what you say but how
you say it.
