Cormac McCarthy - Stella Maris BOOK REVIEW (SPOILERS)

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[whoiswheeler]

There has never been a line that closes a book that floored me as hard as this one

"....thats what people do when they're waiting for the end of something."

[cpyojkb]

"I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.” —Ralph Waldo

[MatthiasVargas]

Rereading the first page of the passenger after reading Stella maris really makes it hit different

[Eveningredening]

I think of the two novels as two separate dreams, like two quarks a universe away from one-another, but still interlinked and ready to fire in response to one another’s impulse. The damnation of not just an unrequitable love from the incestual standpoint, but of a fission in reality that doesn’t allow for either to exist for the other beyond the brushstrokes of the two books’ bindings.
A line that stands out was Alicia mentioning Bobby’s fear of depths. He was afraid of the implications of their love, of plumbing it and consummating it with her. His regret-worn afterlife dream begins with a failed attempt to find a missing person under the water, whereas Alicia thought long and hard about finding terminus in Lake Tahoe. Failing this, Bobby takes to his plow and goes to the deepest oceanic depths— a drill into the ocean floor.

[ubik]

Another great review. Those last lines of the novel are like a punch in the gut, even more so knowing they very well may be the last published words from McCarthy.

[r.k.theartist]

Finished this incredible read yesterday. Perfect timing, Cliff! Great to hear your thoughts when nobody I know is reading authors like McCarthy, let alone reading at all.

[bronzeandsteel]

This book gave me comfort. I was labeled as a gifted student as a kid and I, though I used to think that was a underhanded accusation of autism, I now think just means someone who thinks too much. Active minded.

I struggle with thoughts. With how constant they are and how overwhelming my own mind can be. There's never a moment of peace, where the continuum of my lucid thought gives me any repose. It's just endless, and often makes me miserable. But reading this book, reading how this young woman thinks, gave me some kind of comfort, I think. There are people who have it so much worse, and who truly suffer with pondering their own minds, and hating what they see.

[aidanmcguckin]

Literally just finished it. Left in awe, so much to unpack in this book. Overall I really enjoyed it, definitely a challenge in some parts, but that makes the concepts just as satisfying when you do understand them. I also got that sense of wanting to try doing math again. Alicia's ideas made me think about how the math they teach in schools lack the proper foundation and how people might enjoy doing it more if they had a better idea of the philosophical monolith that mathematics can be.

[jordanwolfcastle]

“The passenger” could also be a metaphor for traveling through the unconscious of Bobby in the coma (if it is him dreaming in the coma) and through the consciousness of Alicia through her hallucinations

[kotymcneal]

A suggestion for a live event: Cliff shows up and reads to us something he wants to share with us. And stops to tell us what he thinks about that passage, and maybe there's audience questions. Cliff continues to read. Wine will be provided. Just like one of your episodes but, instead of talking to a camera you talk to the audience. Like a one man show.

[lockca]

I think these are his best works since Blood Meridian. It took some 15 years for Blood Meridian to be regarded as the masterpiece that it is. I'm really hoping the same thing doesn't happen with this.

[LayneRaisor]

You mentioned some of the mysteries that do not get addressed in Stella Maris, including the contents of the letter that so upset Bobby's friend toward the end of The Passenger. It just occurred to me to wonder if perhaps the letter explained that the ultimate reason Alicia was planning, and eventually did, kill herself was that she was sure that he was dead or would die. It would reveal the deep tragedy that it was his choice to go race cars and get himself nearly killed that doomed Alicia. I think it's cool to imagine that McCarthy doesn't tell us what the letter says, but gives us enough clues to sort of figure out what it must be.

[ArchibaldGurnsbach]

2666 is the saddest book i've ever read, but passages in infinite jest elucidate the architecture of depression and addiction so well as to be almost heartbreaking. love your work, would line up for the poetry slam, and what are your thoughts on graphic literature?

[MikeWiest]

I came to these new books only about a month after I discovered Blood Meridian—and was blown away by it. I don’t know if McCarthy’s other books follow the Blood Meridian pattern, but because of Blood Meridian I came to The Passenger and Stella Maris on high alert for cleverly hidden clues to DEVASTATING REALIZATIONS to come. I was ready to interpret characters partly as allegories. I was also looking for a momentous climax of some kind in the book’s last few pages, like in Blood Meridian.

Right now I judge the new books POSITIVELY: they tried something original and ambitious and arguably succeeded. But I can see a rational reader taking a NEGATIV PERSPECTIVE, which might be summarized something like this: “McCarthy is just vomiting up his pet philosophical musings through the mouth of a genius character in his story; the genius character is not realistic; the love story is not compelling.” I’ll mention one other specific concrete flaw in the books below, but now let me turn to my positive interpretation of the story.

The story can be said to be “about” multiple things, but let me start with the suggestion that The Passenger is about schizophrenia, or more broadly: ways we try to attribute meaning to the events of our lives. We are reminded in the text that there is a genetic component to schizophrenia. The sister is diagnosed with some kind of (atypical) schizophrenia. Meanwhile the brother discusses various paranoid theories with people he knows. To quote Nirvana, “just because you’re paranoid, don’t mean they’re not after you.” When The Kid comes to visit the brother, I saw that as a dramatic confirmation that the brother has a milder case of whatever the sister has. No magical (or quantum physical) explanations are required, since he has heard her describe The Kid in detail.

Two possible, hypothetical routes to some kind of salvation for the brother or sister appear in the story. One is their LOVE. In other works of literature, love is often presented as the purpose or meaning of life; and we are told that love conquers all. The brother and sister represent a deep and pure tragic love like that between Romeo and Juliet. The other potential path to salvation in the books is MATH, PHYSICS, PHILOSOPHY—some kind of intellectual or transcendental insight or mode of being that might “make it all worthwhile.” As I read I was looking for some way the two (love and math-physics) could be married to create some kind of consummation of their love, or redemption and peace, or something.

So now the story is not just about schizophrenia, and I would say it’s not really about math, or the atomic bomb, or the Kennedy assassination either. It’s about whether there is a way to interpret life that is not…nihilistic or absurd or tragic. At least for these characters.

We start with the puzzle of the missing passenger in the submerged plane. We realize that is not where we are going to get answers. These characters are also past looking for ultimate answers from organized religion. So we (they) are left with love, or modern physics and math.

Over the course of the story we are presented with various dreams and hallucinations that might be clues to some transcendental reality in which the lovers are able to fulfill Alicia Western’s impossible dream of having a child with her brother. We have Miss Vivian, the older woman obsessed with the screaming of babies—could she be some kind of future-past Alicia? We have the possibility that the pair did have sex but lied about it or repressed the memory. Maybe there was even an abortion, and the Kid is an image of that and mechanism for “not thinking about that.” We have some characteristically McCarthian passages describing dark creatures emerging from strange primordial demonic soups. Most dramatically to me, we have the moment where the Kid brings a trunk and inside the trunk is a doll and the trunk is labeled Property of Western Union but the Kid reads it as “PROGENY OF WESTERN UNION.”

Given that the siblings are named Western, “Progeny of Western Union” was like a slap in the face. On the next page Alicia is crying and saying she’s sorry to the doll. I thought that had to be a baby. The only thing that didn’t fit is that she said “I was only six years old.” What could that mean, I thought.

Maybe the answer is in the unread letter in The Passenger. Nope. (Spoiler answer: she was six years old; the doll was just a doll. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”)

I was also carefully noting the allusions to physics and math. The main way I could see modern physics contributing to actualizing their love would be through the phenomenon of ENTANGLEMENT, whereby distant parts of a quantum system can be in instantaneous interaction no matter how far apart. Interestingly, this central concept in quantum physics was not really discussed explicitly but only hinted at for example when Alicia says she’d like to discuss BELL’S THEOREM in Stella Maris. In Stella Maris we also get references to the possibility of loops in time, and the possibility that “simulation” will be the real “afterlife.”

Will the final pages reveal that they had sex and a baby? Or that their love created a quantum baby “made purely of light” that needed to be protected in some platonic realm? Or that Bobby’s life was just a simulation his brain created in a coma? Or that they are their own parents and that somehow that’s why Bobby or Alicia or maybe their mom is the missing passenger in the plane? (That last one isn’t even coherent, I don’t think.)

No. We get a bit more about sex-talk and dreams between them, but no consummation nor any baby. I don’t think we get any far-out modern physics interpretation such as Philip K Dick might have written. No, the “boring” interpretation of the story works just fine: they had a forbidden love, they were miserable, and they died lonely and apart. They were preoccupied with things that could never solve the real problem: we’re all dead in the end.

None of the potential “reveals” I could imagine as a reader would really solve the existential problem the characters face. But if the book did end with a reveal like that, that would give us as readers a sort of satisfaction that the characters can’t access—and neither can we in real life.

So if there is an articulable point to the story, it might be a sort of warning to us newfangled atheistic types who get intoxicated by the apparent profundities of math and physics—that although they might appear to give us alternatives to traditional religion for making sense of the world, and making it appear benign or intelligent (as in the line in Stella Maris where she says the issue is whether the universe might be intelligent)—we might trick ourselves into thinking science offers an alternative optimistic worldview—but no. This book is a smack in the face to wake us out of our smug scientist-minded worldview.

So ultimately, we pass THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS LIKE ALICE AND LEWIS CARROLL, BUT END UP BACK IN THIS BLEAK WORLD WITH SCHOPENHAUER. In Schopenhauer’s view the universe does have a mind, but it’s not conscious except in us and other animals. The mind of the universe is a blind will to exist that leads to different parts of the universe eating each other not realizing they are eating themselves. So everything lives according to urges we don’t understand, suffers more or less, and disappears with no lasting trace.

Aside from the many funny parts in The Passenger (perhaps unexpected in such a dark story), the faint happy notes in the story result from human connections, such as the holding of hands at the end of Stella Maris. One other point I have not seen mentioned by others is THE RED SASH that Alicia’s body is wearing at the start of The Passenger. In Stella Maris she says she wants to be completely erased from existence and not found, but in the Passenger we are told explicitly that she wore a red sash “so that she’d be found.” So maybe she had developed her relationship with Dr. Cohen enough that she wanted to reestablish a connection with the rest of humanity—if only after her death.

In summary: the worst spoiler for this story is: there are no spoilers. What appear to be spoilers are decoys. There are no spoilers because there are no satisfying answers that can be revealed, to the problems faced by the characters—or us.

Final note regarding an apparent flaw: the author uses “dubious” multiple times when he appears to mean “doubtful.” This is not so minor because the characters are supposed to be hyper-intelligent and hyper-educated, and they make a habit of correcting others’ pronunciation and grammar. So it broke the spell for me (to some extent) when it turned out they don’t know the difference between DUBIOUS and DOUBTFUL.

[FisherKing]

Public event idea: select and read a few short stories, lead discussions based on them. I frequently go back to your reading of Hemingway’s “Short Happy Life of Francis McCawber” (apologize for the probable misspelling) and I’d love to hear you read more stories. Poe, O’Connor, anyone. Admittedly I don’t know how this would work with copyrights, but I think that’d be amazing.

Also, if you haven’t read it, I recommend James Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet. Just finished the second book, The Big Nowhere, and words cannot describe how fucking amazing that story is. Ellroy’s ability to make complete and utter shitbags likable characters is legitimately astounding.

Season’s Greetings from KC MO, @BetterThanFood. Been watching your channel since 2018 and I thank you for being the main inspiration for my personal reading list.

[Engel]

I finished both books yesterday and I must say, it gave me both a profound sadness as well as a great acceptance of death and its related finalities. Also, great reviews as usual Clifford, and as a longtime sub whom doesn’t really comment often (if at all) these two reviews are some of your best. Keep doing that voodoo you do so well.

[IndieAuthorX]

I like how Stella Maris and The Passenger essentially leave us wondering what the historical events were. It found that sweet spot where both characters were dead to the other and both characters were united in their loss for the other... because if The Passenger is true, Alicia is dead and if Stella Maris is true then Bobby is dead. However, Stella Maris never states that Alicia took her life and if Bobby did die in that accident, then The Passenger's claim that Alicia took her life was not verified.

[THFLCNx]

Oh man I can't wait to read this! McCarthy is such a master of dialogue, I really wanna see what it's like to read a book by him comprised solely of dialogue. Hope it slays! :D

[gm]

Great review and nice to include the Betterhelp sponsorship with this book. I think these are books I will reread each year.

[etherealbonds]

Please do a review on Michel Houellebecq - Annihilate. It's literally a novel destroying itself. It's impossible to see coming what happens in the last chapter and when it happens it feels like being glued to the trails while the train is approaching you. It is incredibly unfulfilling, emotionally brutal and disturbing. The dream scenes are really interesting as well. Sex, longing for meaning and then death without any tension resolved. No conclusion at all. I think it's his masterpiece. Please. Do. A. Review. 😭