Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

Time is completely slipping out of joint for me, being now sat on my fourth flight in three days, with only two three and a half hour bursts of sleep on the two middle flights (plus an hour hidden behind a check in desk in Larnaca Airport)… I have walked around an unfamiliar island for four hours between 11 and 3am… I have wandered around a ruined city that’s been partially and confusingly restored into a point of partial ruin, and I’ve then tried and failed to have a busy touristic morning in Delhi, confused and limited in my options due to my millennial preference for cashlessness and the majority of digital transactions here being via UPI (a QR code auto bank transfer thing?) rather than card (or device) payments, as I am used to.

I arrived at 3am on Tuesday 7th November and it is now 12 hours later and I’m on a flight out of the city. I walked a lot. My feet are sore from all the walking I’ve done today and I haven’t changed socks or pants (or shirt, though I have topped up deodorant a few times which means my pits don’t smell like I imagine my feet and scrotum do), I’ve only cleaned my teeth twice (though I have “used” some sugar free vegan gum a few times on top of that (which is like kinda cleaning your teeth, right???) and as well as walking I’ve also done a surprising amount of running, as a result of trying (and succeeding every.damn.time to cross roads of near constant traffic as I tried (and failed) to reach more than a couple of historic buildings…

I did have a proper meal (i.e. with vitamins and no chips), though, my first in days, so that’s a positive! And I did see some historic buildings from the outside, and I did spend a little over an hour in an art gallery, and – the other crucial thing I did – I also finished reading Stella Maris, the final published novel (for now!) by dead white American male, Cormac McCarthy.

The key thing I’m going to try and not do – and I’m honestly surprised that this hasn’t been discussed more – is to try and approach Stella Maris and its writer in the way lots of people approach Lolita and therefore Nabokov… Is this just a pervy guy’s pervy fantasy?

Alicia, the sister of Bobby Western from off of The Passenger, is the protagonist here, and she is all of the following things: hyper intelligent, really like kooky, desperate to fuck her brother and – the kicker – like, properly, like, really fit. It would, therefore, be easy to dismiss this as a male fantasy (certainly it edges towards male fantasy tropes), but (again, like with Lolita), McCarthy has put the effort and the research in to flesh out (that isn’t like a euphemism for shag) this character so that she and her life story is… Maybe not realistic or knowable, but coherent, cohesive, literary… detailed. Alicia is not just an old man’s fantasy incest young math genius (I mean she is that), but she’s also a coherent fictional whole.

The novel is just the conversations between Alicia and a psychologist in the institution she repeatedly spent time in (nothing more at all – and the novel as a whole is 95% dialogue, to the point where the handful of moments where there are descriptions or thought feel like an accidental overthought when everything was stripped back at some point during the writing process…) and they are set in the weeks or days (months, maybe?) following Bobby Western’s car crash that left him in a coma in Europe, which in The Passenger happened well over a decade before the majority of that novel was set. Alicia and her therapist discuss her relationship with her brother, her parents, her grandparents… McCarthy delves deep into experimental mathematics, into the construction of violins, much more into the construction of the Atom Bomb… also into the nature of hallucinations, into synesthesia, into regret, into desire, into madness, despair, pain, suffering, hope and hopelessness… Also into grief, because – spoiler ahead – the big difference between this and The Passenger is that Bobby didn’t make it out of his coma, and instead of returning to the US to become a salvage diver who eventually meets his sister’s hallucinated companions, he died long ago and far away.

Is The Passenger, then, recast as coma dream? Or does this novel bear not at all on the reality of that text… It’s a moot point lol

This novel, though, does build a complex and a far-reaching history (also for the therapist!) out of just dialogue, and though it is much, much, shorter than the other book, its complexity, wit, emotionality mean that this doesn’t just become a dry text about maths and philosophy narrated by a horny woman the reader is repeatedly told is fit… Again, reminiscent of David Foster Wallace (Brief interviews with incest woman, perhaps?), but also reminiscent of John Fowles, of other horny postmodernisms about madness and sanity, about the potentials for different perspectives and perceptions to not be inherently contradictions…

Is it an excellent novel? I don’t know. But it’s certainly a very good one. Haunting and evocative, though simple, short, and difficult to approach without considering it as a part of The Passenger, which is a much more novel-shaped novel. Is it merely a 180-page (or whatever) appendix to that? No, I think it is better than that… But maybe I should have ignored the reviewers and the publishers and read this one first?

Who fucking knows?

But did I enjoy it? Yes, I think I did.

On to something different!