Stella Maris (Vintage International)

First off, Stella Maris will be the last novel by Cormac McCarthy we will ever have. He's almost 90 and hasn't been very well for the last few years. It's remarkable that he was still able to persevere and finish his final two novels, this one and "The Passenger," its companion work.Second, it sounds like quite a few readers just didn't "get" this work or its larger companion. One reviewer here wrote that he was confused by who died first - Alicia or Bobby. The Passenger made it quite clear Alicia committed suicide because she believed her beloved brother had been left brain dead in a racing car accident and the doctors who wanted to "pull the plug" on him had done so, but that Bobby emerged from his coma some time after her death and was later informed of it. It's part of the paralyzing freight of guilt her brother carries, a recapitulation, in a sense, of the guilt Suttree carried because his umbilical cord had strangled his unborn twin in their mother's womb.Third, Alicia is not McCarthy's first "female lead," as another reviewer writes. Pride of place for that title went to Rinthy Holme in McCarthy's early Appalachian period novel, "Outer Dark" - another woman in an incestuous relationship with her brother. It's a theme which has clearly interested McCarthy for most of his career.But Alicia and her group of schizoid hallucinations, her "horts" (short for cohorts) as she calls them, are also fascinating subjects in this work. I've never seen the metaphysics, if you will, of hallucinations and reality laid so bare and so precisely contrasted as they are in this remarkable work. If you've read the passenger you will already have identified the horts as a combination of Arturo Binewski's carnival freaks from Katherine Dunn's masterful novel "Geek Love" and the characters from Alice in Wonderland, with Alicia standing in for Alice and the Kid, obsessively checking his watch, for the Mad Hatter. On the eve of her death Alicia refuses to deny her imaginary companions the dignity of their own tenuous being; her discussions with her psychiatrist (who finally gets the answers she has been so resistant to disclosing) about the natures of love and suicide are unsettling, unsparing and as arresting as they are troubling.It also seems some readers didn't discern the shape of the narrative, but it definitely has one - Alicia's progression, through therapy she ducks, dodges and resists, to finally coming to terms with her incestuous desire for her brother and to his death which hasn't actually happened. I found this novel a stunning accomplishment, and Cormac McCarthy has surely earned his retirement.

It is very good but not really a standalone work. Unlike The Passenger of which it is the second half.

Cormac McCarthy's final novels are puzzles to figure out, but hardly an impossible task. Ambiguity can be found on each level, as with the joy in James Joyce, so with the catharsis in McCarthy.The two major MacGuffins in here were proclaimed in the pre-publication publicity. The symbolic salvaged plane crash at the start, the missing black box and the missing passenger--these turn out to be symbolic, important but not the driving plot line.But the greater MacGuffin is the over-hyped incest and family pedophilia which disappears before our sight on a close reading on the novels. This misdirection too is the author's aim, to show us how easily we are fooled by gossip and hearsay. The brother/sister love story that remains is agape love, and McCarthy knew that this shallow, materialist, hedonist culture--up to its chin in high school melodrama and tabloid celebrity gossip--would not recognize agape love when they saw it.The hedonist Sheddan says of Bobby, that "all the time, he's banging his sister," which reads one way in the gossip, yet a far different way if we think of humanity banging sister/daughter/Mother Earth with nuclear tests, killing the wildlife and raping the land.Sheddan asks, "What is it that we're looking for? It's not grace or salvation and it is droll beyond words to imagine that it's love."Ah, but it is Grace, and it is Salvation, and it is Love.What do you salvage? someone asks Bobby. Whatever's lost, Bobby replies. Salvation of what is lost.McCarthy melds/welds religion and ancient myth together with modernism, and says what he has been saying all along, that one story is all stories, that every man is a Child of God, but also part clay, of this earth, subject to naturalism despite all the proclamations of Marxists, Nazis, and other true believer utopians.On one level, Alice Western is symbolically naturalism, Mother Nature, Mother Earth, sister, daughter, the Eternal Feminine. Bobby Western is Humankind, just a passenger on this earth, but he carries the fire. The relationship between the two novels, on this level, is like that quote in McCarthy's THE ROAD: "By day the banished sun circles the earth like a grieving mother with a lamp."For one level, Bobby and Alice are of one mind, different hemispheres of the individual human brain. For surely, Cormac McCarthy has read Iain McGilchrist's THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY: THE DIVIDED BRAIN AND THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN WORLD, from which sections could be source transposed, book to novel, fact to fiction. Chip Kidd's case cover design reflects this, with the slot dividing the two books representing the divided human brain.Bobby is the story-teller, the translator of the material word to language, a creation representing Everyman, all stories being one as in Joseph Campbell's THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES. Bobby tries to find the string in the maze, the linear story in everything, but he is lost without Alice and must be content to hold her in his imagination, as Dante held the face of Beatrice, as the man in McCarthy's THE ROAD saw the face of his son. Agape love.McCarthy melds/welds much of his personal history/travels with mathematical/scientific history and with literary scientific and philosophical works, and uses that under mythical and religious references, a New Orleans gumbo that is worth diving into again and again.I see one level as Judeo-Christian, the story of Genesis and the Tree of Knowledge, and Bobby Western is like biblical JOB 5:8, such as in "Man is born of trouble as the sparks fall upward," that suffering is universal, but that misery is a choice. Bobby chooses the glass-half-full over the misery and the traps of addiction. Individual Job-like gratitude and faith in the face of all trouble and all paradox. Life as both a test and a gift, even if we don't understand the test nor can be certain of the Nature of the Giver.One level is the Prometheus interpretation. When Prometheus gave humans fire to help and comfort them, Zeus laughed, because Zeus knew that humans with their hubris could not handle this knowledge, and that it would lead to their destruction. Thus the sparks in stone from flint was also used to craft the arrowhead, then to greater and greater weaponry of war with which to kill each other, then now to nuclear weapons which threaten to lead to nuclear winter, perhaps to another extinction.In case you didn't know, McCarthy's early novels had animals aplenty, but as the novels progressed, more and more animals were killed off, novel by novel, fences and borders closing in, until they were all gone in THE ROAD, where there was nuclear winter.Here is Complexity Theory and more. I suppose I should cite WORLDS HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: The Evolving Idea of Complexity at the Santa Fe Institute, 1984–2019 (Compass) by David C. Krakauer. McCarthy gives us everything but the kitchen sink; then when we have our hands full, he piles on the sink.Some of us may bizarrely owe our existence to Adolph Hitler, as the text says, and my father used to say that, as he was in the force getting ready to invade Japan when the atom bombs were dropped, he owed his existence to the atom bomb (and you should see Paul Fussell's excellent THANK GOD FOR THE ATOM BOMB).Yet there is order hidden in plain sight here too. Bell's Theorem, where Alice and Bob are connected through the bariatric welding (just as in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, Chigurh and Bell were connected by Moss, who was a welder). John Jeremiah Sullivan's review of THE PASSENGER in the NYT was close to the mark when he described this as Janus-faced.On that plane. A Janus-faced phrase, one referring to the different paradigms of existence; the physical plane is uncanny but it is Bob's nature to try to make a linear narrative out of everything; time is out of joint, per Hamlet, yet Hamlet (and our political hubris) always try to set it right, in idealist utopian folly--for this world/humanity has been flawed since the Fall and cannot be made right again.Bob is just a passenger here on Mother Earth, and he carries the fire, the soul.And to switch metaphors again, Bob is the storyteller, and the story he tells is all human stories, myth and religion co-joined. We are bits of water coming in on that blue wave from the Sea, we crash on the beach, alien there, and become separated into individual drops, and develop egos and start thinking we are exclusive seas, not recognizing our real nature or our common source. We are spiritual beings having a physical experience.The sole individual shrinks away but the soul is always reborn again in that wave. On another level, Alice is Plato, math, numbers, forms, and Bob is Aristotle, physics, science as perceived through the senses.Then on another level, it is Plato's Eternal Return, where Bob represents humanity and Alice represents Naturalism, Mother Nature, an Earth Mother, the Eternal Feminine (mother, sister, daughter). Human gets wiped out by his own hubris, crucifies himself, but the earth is eternal. Bob comes back from the sea, and yearns for God, Mother Mary, Stella Maris.I read the novels along with Iain McGilchrist's THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY; Benjamin Labatut's WHEN WE CEASE TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD; Spengler's THE DECLINE OF THE WEST; Rebecca Goldstein's INCOMPLETENESS AND GODEL; Carol Flake's NEW ORLEANS: BEHIND THE MASKS OF AMERICA'S MOST EXOTIC CITY. Some scholar is probably already on a map which points out all of the historical places in here.

I am a big McCarthy fan and I am struggling to find a place to put this work. It is, of course, very well and smartly written but it does strain one’s senses a bit. It is interesting and captivating, while also being somewhat cumbersome and off putting at the same time. McCarthy shows again that he can paint with words with the very best of them. I think he is in some ways showing off, but not sure if it is for the reader, himself, or some unknown. It is self indulgent but still can suck you into the world he is weaving. I likely will need to let this sit and maybe read it again at some point in the future, or maybe not.

To be read together with The Passenger. The two novels are very different in form (Stella Maris entirely in dialogue), but the main characters and plots are the same, from different perspectives. No less than the meaning of life and death on every page.

Il libro è una passeggiata sull'orlo dell'abisso. McCarthy è un genio.

Cormac McCarthy's narrative pays tribute to directed dialogue in prose. A psychiatrist and his patient form a rich exchange highly revealing of the complexities of mental health and mental capacity. Between Stella Maris and The Passenger, McCarthy shows himself a master of real-life dialogue; he creates a near perfect house for his characters which yields a higher vision of human nature. The attention to it is phenomenally well worded. McCarthy's novels reawaken the question of our own consciousness even in the simplest of relations.

I think it’s incredible; a unique meditation on existence, love, reality and perception; to name a few. I think you have to have a relationship you really want to develop with the character from The Passenger. If you don’t, you’re likely to struggle. The book doesn’t compromise either in terms of the conversational devices and themes it uses but it would have been impossible to write the character and get into the areas it ventures if he’d dumbed down. I cried instantly at the end.

It was a worthwhile experience reading the master’s work. I was moved, and removed from the familiar. At times I was confused, felt fear, anxiety, relief and sorrow.