Cormac McCarthy

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.  As Lucas Opgenorth writes:

Until Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy wrote in relative obscurity. With the novel’s publication, he came to be known as a leading figure in American fiction, with his stature still continuing to grow. McCarthy’s novels tend to be dark, dealing with themes of death and violence, but Blood Meridian, according to critic Harold Bloom, is an achievement unlike anything that he wrote before or after. Opacity and a resistance to interpretation dominate the novel, which tells a fictionalized account of a gang of scalpers in the American Southwest around the middle of the nineteenth century the early stages of America’s westward expansion. McCarthy’s writing is as descriptive of the beauty and power of the novel’s landscape as it is of the frequent and grotesque violence enacted by and upon the novel’s characters. The result is a literary portrait of the insignificance of man in the face of nature, the passage of time, and the ungovernable force of violence.

Cormac 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.