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Cormac McCarthy’s unsettling dream of a novel
Dwight Garner, New York Times
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Artists
tend to simplify their form with age, and the big novel has traditionally been,
to paraphrase writers dead and living, no country for very old men. But this
fall, Cormac McCarthy, who is pushing 90, has arrived with a pair of audacious
linked novels: one a total banger and the other no embarrassment. If this is
what it sounds like to be on your last legs, young writers should ask their
server for whatever he is having. If McCarthy’s voice is any indication, he is
still limber enough to outrun an aggrieved cheetah in his drawers and stocking
feet.اضافة اعلان
The first novel, “The Passenger”, was published in October. It blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels — especially “Suttree” (1979) — with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work. It is the first novel I have read in years that I feel I need to read three more times to fully understand and that I want to read three more times simply to savor. It is so packed with funny, strange, haunted sentences that other writers will be stealing lines from it for epigraphs, as if it were Ecclesiastes, for the next 150 years.
The second of these novels, “Stella Maris”, is out now. The title refers not to a stern-minded young woman on horseback, which is what you might imagine if all you knew of McCarthy was his Border Trilogy, but to a psychiatric hospital in Black River Falls, Wisconsin.
It is where 20-year-old Alicia Western, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, has checked herself in because she has been hallucinating. Central among her visions is a shambolic dwarf with flippers and a bent sense of humor known as the Thalidomide Kid. Alicia is also carrying a plastic bag stuffed with $40,000, which she tries to give away to the receptionist.
Novels are not made, generally, to be filled entirely by talk. But that is what “Stella Maris” is — transcriptions of therapy sessions with one of the hospital’s shrinks. This is a Tom Stoppardesque bull session. Does it work? Uh-huh. Does it work more fully if you have already read “The Passenger”? Absolutely.
Among the first things we learn in Alicia’s sessions is that she is grieving the apparent death of her brother, Bobby, who has been in a long coma since a car-racing accident in Italy. Alicia and Bobby share a cursed inheritance; their father was a physicist on the Manhattan Project. They are a high-voltage combination. They share a genius for math — there are extra wires in their brains — and are so close that incest is a simmering sub-theme in both novels.
If “Stella Maris” is Alicia’s novel, “The Passenger” is Bobby’s. The earlier book is hard to describe in a few sentences, but here goes. Bobby is a laconic salvage diver who saw things he should not have. Before long, he is pursued not only by G-men but, it seems, all the ghosts of the 20th century. He is an oddly upper-class desperado, like Townes Van Zandt. The whole thing reads like a cosmic, bleakly funny John D. MacDonald thriller.
“The Passenger” is a great New Orleans novel. It is a great food novel. (One important scene takes place over a platter of the chicken a la grande at Mosca’s.) For anyone who cares, it is also a great Knoxville, Tennessee, novel — Knoxville being where McCarthy spent most of his childhood. It is filled with references to his earlier work. It is a sprawling book of ideas — about mathematics, the nature of knowledge, the importance of fast cars — that also contains flatulence jokes. It slips into pretentiousness only to slip right back out again. McCarthy knows that we know that he knows that he can lay it on thick.
“Stella Maris” is, by comparison, a small and frequently elegiac novel. It is best read while you are still buzzing from the previous book. Its themes are dark ones, and yet it brings you home, like the piano coda at the end of “Layla”.
A lot of what Alicia wants to talk about is mathematics; numbers filled her up, only to scour her out. She has largely abandoned the practice. She pushed equations until they led into chasms instead of bridges; they bent into witchcraft. McCarthy’s own late-life interest in physics is everywhere apparent. Here is Alicia:
”Verbal intelligence will only take you so far. There is a wall there, and if you don’t understand numbers you won’t even see the wall. People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you. They will be cordial — or not — depending on their nature.”
No one in the real world talks the way Alicia does — she is seeing with her third eye, flexing her middle finger at the world, rocking her family’s thundersome legacy — but they might if they could.
McCarthy being McCarthy, Alicia has done the hard thinking about suicide. One of this book’s bravura passages is her extended analysis of how miserable it would be to try to kill yourself by drowning. The most moving moments in “Stella Maris” braid her feelings for her brother, which go through her like a spear, with a sense of intellectual futility.
Reading “Stella Maris” after “The Passenger” is like trying to hang onto a dream. It is an uncanny, unsettling dream, tuned into the static of the universe. In “The Road” (2006), McCarthy put it this way: “Nobody wants to be here, and nobody wants to leave.”
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The first novel, “The Passenger”, was published in October. It blends the rowdy humor of some of McCarthy’s early novels — especially “Suttree” (1979) — with the parched tone of his more apocalyptic later work. It is the first novel I have read in years that I feel I need to read three more times to fully understand and that I want to read three more times simply to savor. It is so packed with funny, strange, haunted sentences that other writers will be stealing lines from it for epigraphs, as if it were Ecclesiastes, for the next 150 years.
The second of these novels, “Stella Maris”, is out now. The title refers not to a stern-minded young woman on horseback, which is what you might imagine if all you knew of McCarthy was his Border Trilogy, but to a psychiatric hospital in Black River Falls, Wisconsin.
It is where 20-year-old Alicia Western, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, has checked herself in because she has been hallucinating. Central among her visions is a shambolic dwarf with flippers and a bent sense of humor known as the Thalidomide Kid. Alicia is also carrying a plastic bag stuffed with $40,000, which she tries to give away to the receptionist.
Novels are not made, generally, to be filled entirely by talk. But that is what “Stella Maris” is — transcriptions of therapy sessions with one of the hospital’s shrinks. This is a Tom Stoppardesque bull session. Does it work? Uh-huh. Does it work more fully if you have already read “The Passenger”? Absolutely.
Among the first things we learn in Alicia’s sessions is that she is grieving the apparent death of her brother, Bobby, who has been in a long coma since a car-racing accident in Italy. Alicia and Bobby share a cursed inheritance; their father was a physicist on the Manhattan Project. They are a high-voltage combination. They share a genius for math — there are extra wires in their brains — and are so close that incest is a simmering sub-theme in both novels.
If “Stella Maris” is Alicia’s novel, “The Passenger” is Bobby’s. The earlier book is hard to describe in a few sentences, but here goes. Bobby is a laconic salvage diver who saw things he should not have. Before long, he is pursued not only by G-men but, it seems, all the ghosts of the 20th century. He is an oddly upper-class desperado, like Townes Van Zandt. The whole thing reads like a cosmic, bleakly funny John D. MacDonald thriller.
“The Passenger” is a great New Orleans novel. It is a great food novel. (One important scene takes place over a platter of the chicken a la grande at Mosca’s.) For anyone who cares, it is also a great Knoxville, Tennessee, novel — Knoxville being where McCarthy spent most of his childhood. It is filled with references to his earlier work. It is a sprawling book of ideas — about mathematics, the nature of knowledge, the importance of fast cars — that also contains flatulence jokes. It slips into pretentiousness only to slip right back out again. McCarthy knows that we know that he knows that he can lay it on thick.
“Stella Maris” is, by comparison, a small and frequently elegiac novel. It is best read while you are still buzzing from the previous book. Its themes are dark ones, and yet it brings you home, like the piano coda at the end of “Layla”.
A lot of what Alicia wants to talk about is mathematics; numbers filled her up, only to scour her out. She has largely abandoned the practice. She pushed equations until they led into chasms instead of bridges; they bent into witchcraft. McCarthy’s own late-life interest in physics is everywhere apparent. Here is Alicia:
”Verbal intelligence will only take you so far. There is a wall there, and if you don’t understand numbers you won’t even see the wall. People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you. They will be cordial — or not — depending on their nature.”
No one in the real world talks the way Alicia does — she is seeing with her third eye, flexing her middle finger at the world, rocking her family’s thundersome legacy — but they might if they could.
McCarthy being McCarthy, Alicia has done the hard thinking about suicide. One of this book’s bravura passages is her extended analysis of how miserable it would be to try to kill yourself by drowning. The most moving moments in “Stella Maris” braid her feelings for her brother, which go through her like a spear, with a sense of intellectual futility.
Reading “Stella Maris” after “The Passenger” is like trying to hang onto a dream. It is an uncanny, unsettling dream, tuned into the static of the universe. In “The Road” (2006), McCarthy put it this way: “Nobody wants to be here, and nobody wants to leave.”
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