Spoiler Alert: Considerable plot reveal
I’ve been a big fan of Southern Gothic maestro Cormac McCarthy for years. His “Border Trilogy” entirely recalibrated my understanding of what it was to be a man. Blood Meridian was one of the best books I’d ever read, likely the best if I forget about Dostoevsky.
I had assumed that he had passed away by now, so was shocked to see that he had a new book out earlier this month, Stella Maris. The novel is a compliment to one published a few months ago, entitled The Passenger.
The pair of novels concern a brilliantly gifted young woman, Alisia, and her equally gifted older brother, Bobby, with whom she is passionately in love. She is also a schizophrenic who sees strange beings. It being a McCarthy novel, one knows of course that the protagonists, like those of Dostoevsky, are going to be totally fucked-up by the end. Indeed, the opening paragraph of The Passenger describes Alisia’s dead body as it lies, having been killed by her own hand.
Stella Maris, the second of the pair of novels, takes place entirely in the Stella Maris psychiatric facility, where Alisia has interned herself. The novel consists solely of the recorded dialogue between herself and the one therapist with whom she has managed to forge sufficient of a connection to open up to about her life and feelings.
The novels are set in the 1980s and 90s. Born a child genius, of two genius parents, Alisia was for a while a major mathematics prodigy, reading Gödel whilst her schoolmates turned the pages of comics. Her father worked with Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, something which brother Bobby still carries guilt about. Her mother was a beauty queen as well as a physicist and Alisia has inherited her stunning good looks, as well as her incredible brain.
In some ways, according to the traditional values of Western society, Alicia has it all. An amazing mind and an attractive body. She can reach to the highest levels of abstract thought, be it maths, physics or philosophy. She forgets nothing and reads two books a day.
Yet she has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and converses with strange beings. She is also madly in love with her own brother, and driven crazy by his refusal to elope with her to some place where people won’t know they are related. He refuses on the grounds that it’s totally taboo, whereas to her the concerns of society are only marginally relevant.
Alicia and Bobby have mysteriously acquired a huge fortune, left to them as buried gold coins by a grandmother. Alicia uses the money to purchase an insanely rare violin, at an insanely high price, sight unseen, but in the end does not play it because she realises that she will never be in the top ten violinists worldwide.
With his side of the fortune, Bobby pursues his dream of becoming a successful motor race driver. He competes at Formula 2 level in Europe until a major accident leaves him in a coma in an Italian hospital. Heartbroken, Alisia attends his side, unable to consent to “pull the plug,” and finally returns to America where she places herself in Stella Maris.
Having found one therapist to whom she can relate to and who, unlike the others, does not try to have sex with her, she progressively reveals her life-history whilst interned in the psychiatric unit on suicide watch. The psychologically significant bits come slowly, separated by lengthy descriptions of her experience and understanding of maths, philosophy and physics - subjects in which her therapist is also interested. Stella Maris concludes with Alicia finally electing to commit suicide.
The story resumes, in a sense, in the first novel, The Passenger. Bobby has mysteriously recovered from his coma and returned to America. In scenes reminiscent of Romeo and Juliet, he finds his sister, whom he has rejected despite being madly in love with, dead by suicide. Driven crazy with guilt, his life begins on a slowly descending spiral as bit by bit his talent, brains and confidence are lost to him.
Working as a commercial diver for a salvage firm, he one day falls foul of a mysterious government department because of something he has accidentally discovered. They end up impounding his Maserati and cutting off his access to money. He flees the country on false ID and ends up in Formentera, a small island in the Balearics.
However, Bobby is not quite so fucked-up that he ends his days drinking himself into a nightly stupor in the village bar, as one could imagine he might. No, the novel concludes with him still communing with nature, living in a small hut, building fires on the beach and falling asleep under the stars. He still has a rich inner world but it is so imbued with guilt and loss, through the suicide of his sister, that he can do nothing more that make what remains of his life a shrine to her memory.
I found the novel a beautiful, tragic tale, and one where McCarthy gives little hint that things could have ended any better had circumstances been different. Central to the story for me was Alisia’s brilliant mind and how finally it led her to suicide. Had she been a man, perhaps, she could have spent her days pursuing academic fame, or maybe a Nobel prize. But whilst these ego-attainments were attractive to her, they were inadequate to sustain her on any coherent academic path. Her mind was too pure. And she could see so deeply into these abstract worlds, that finally all the underlying symmetry and meaning that she occasionally found would descend back into confusion as she looked deeper.
Alisia discovered for herself why so many great minds in the past have finally gone insane. Thinking of itself cannot sustain us, cannot give us the nourishment that we truly need. To find meaning we must have a deep sense of the body, and heart and belly too. We have to be capable of being sufficiently present with ourselves or another such that our mind can fade into the background, at least once in a while.
I’m not one of these people who say that we must go back to the values or structures of the past to find meaning. I’m fine to look for other options. I simply acknowledge that thinking, of itself, is inadequate to keep us alive. It inevitably ends in nihilism, a theme that haunts the work of Dostoevsky too. We can think. But if that is all we can do, it won’t be enough to keep us mentally or physically healthy, not long-term.
I don’t know if this was a message that McCarthy was intending to convey. But I am grateful to him for writing this pair of novels. I hope he has more in him yet.
Once I was dating a guy who eventually became a race car driver - we were driving north to go skiing about a 6 hour drive - his family had a chalet in Vermont , and he says “ there is a pot hole around here to watch out for .” At which very moment we hit it - still makes me laugh out loud . Flat tire etc . But his race car driver mind had the entire highway - all 6 hours of it not just mapped but cartography mapped — surface mapped … yet his logistic mind was still separate and observing … not reacting . I believe that the message of this book you described - the coma and the voluntary disconnect from real life of the brother and sister pretty much sums up most peoples reaction to reality . They just do it at a more subtle level . I’m telling this story because he called the pothole literally at the time the pothole was there - it wasn’t a minute / it was the second before - so in his system the connection and timing was perfect - just the wiring was off - the trust of his own signals . I believe what your work is about is re wiring that circuit board to self , in places where it was mal connected to represent “not self” ( nihilism)
I am increasingly convinced that perception is reality. Even if one's perception is a total engagement with the real. The limitations, even of perfection, expose themselves in their interaction with people and with the divine. In this sense, there is no actual perfection and no actual total immersion with reality. There is only the perception of each. As a result, real engagement begins with respect for the "other" or the "outside" of what we know. It is interesting that she read Gödel who had his own genius conflict with other geniuses with his incompleteness theorem. This adds another dimension to the perception of reality, the perception of perfection and the perception of our relationship to the world apart from his. Thank you for a great review.