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Summary
Summary
God. Truth. Existence. From the legendary author Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris is a masterful coda to The Passenger .
'It's an uncanny, unsettling dream, tuned into the static of the universe' - New York Times
A mathematician, twenty years-old, is admitted to the hospital. She has forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, and one request. She does not want to talk about her brother.
Stella Maris is book two in a duology, preceded by The Passenger .
Praise for The Passenger :
'What a glorious sunset song . . . It's rich and it's strange, mercurial and melancholic' - Guardian
'The Passenger shows that McCarthy belongs in the company of Melville and Dostoevsky, writers the world will never cease to need' - New Statesman
Praise for Cormac McCarthy:
'McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute' - Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren
'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' - Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series
'[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' - Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain
Genre:
Psychological fiction. |
Historical fiction. |
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
McCarthy's underwhelming companion piece to The Passenger, set eight years earlier, in 1972, begins with a one-paragraph case file for 20-year-old PhD candidate Alicia Western. Alicia, who has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, has been dropped off at Stella Maris, a psychiatric hospital in rural Wisconsin, with over $40,000 in cash. What follows is a series of conversations between Alicia and her psychiatrist, Dr. Cohen, written like a play but with no exposition, stage directions, or dialogue tags. The subjects include mathematics, quantum mechanics, music theory, and obscure philosophy. Before Alicia arrived at Stella Maris, her Formula 1 driver brother, Bobby Western, had a crash during a race that put him into a coma. She's in love with Bobby, but refuses to talk about him with Cohen until the third act. There are scraps of humor ("Mathematics is ultimately a faith-based initiative. And faith is an uncertain business," Alicia tells Cohen), though not much tension, as the reader already knows how things will end (Alicia's body is discovered on the first page of The Passenger). McCarthy has swum in these waters before, and with more impressive strokes. Strangely, The Passenger offers a more successful ending to the story of Alicia and Bobby. Though this volume feels extraneous, McCarthy diehards will still flock to it. (Dec.)
Guardian Review
Some books arrive predusted with the shimmer of literary myth. Stella Maris is one of them: Cormac McCarthy's 12th - and likely final - novel, a tale concocted at the Santa Fe Institute, "a thinktank for maverick brainiacs" where the 89-year-old author spends his days discoursing with quantum physicists and clacking away on his portable typewriter, marinating in genius. For a writer who spurns the conventions of punctuation, Stella Maris feels a lot like a full stop, a parting pronouncement on the whole sordid human experiment. It's the second McCarthy novel to be published this year - a companion volume to The Passenger, released in late October. After 16 years of literary silence, McCarthy has produced a drought-busting, brain-vexing double act: first, a nihilistic vaudeville; now, its austere twin. If that weren't enough mythic glitter, Stella Maris is helmed by the first female protagonist McCarthy has dared to write since 1968. "I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years," he told the Wall Street Journal in 2009. "I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try." How arduous he makes it all sound - plumbing the treacherous, alien depths of a ladybrain. McCarthy's grand attempt at cross-gender empathy is Alicia, a former child prodigy turned rogue mathematician. Stella Maris opens in the autumn of 1972 when the 20-year-old checks herself into a private psychiatric clinic in Wisconsin. She arrives with a bag full of cash and an accompanying cast of hallucinations led by a flipper-handed dwarf who calls himself "the Thalidomide Kid" (the grating, high-literary equivalent of Jar Jar Binks). A world away, on life support in a European hospital, Alicia's brother, Bobby, lies braindead. Or so she thinks. (The Passenger tells his post-coma story.) Women, I am repeatedly told, don't like - don't get - Cormac McCarthy. It's the kind of patronising nonsense that gets levelled at us when we point out the converse: that McCarthy's fiction doesn't get - doesn't like - women. When female characters do appear in his pages, they are cowards, victims and sexpots: sirenic doom-bringers, cheetah-owning dommes, simpering twits and bad mothers. It's often possible to admire the Pulitzer prize winner despite his paper-thin girls (see also Roth, Updike, Mailer and all the other cocksure Americans). Not in this novel. Stella Maris is a transcript of Alicia's therapy sessions. The book hangs on her voice, and that voice is preposterous. Alicia is the character you'd invent if you set out to skewer McCarthy's frontier-fawning machoism. She's a gordian knot of pathologies: synaesthetic, schizophrenic, autistic, anorexic, nihilistic, suicidal and in love with her brother. She can read clocks backwards, and play virtuoso violin. She's also "extremely good looking". And a lesbian (although her psychiatrist, Dr Cohen, has his doubts: "I don't think so," he tells her. "You flirt with me for one thing"). Listening to Bach is the closest she comes to joy. If you turned Stella Maris into a drinking game - a shot of Appalachian moonshine for every eye roll - you'd be hammered before the end of chapter one (long before McCarthy's "joke" about Jewish mathematicians; or Alicia's confession that she was "a twelve-year-old slut"). There's the link McCarthy makes between Alicia's madness and her menstrual cycle; her certainty that motherhood is the cure for all her existential woes ("If I had a child I wouldnt care about reality"); her atomically weaponised daddy issues (Alicia's father was one of the physicists on the Manhattan Project). The grotty little mystery at the heart of Stella Maris is just how far Alicia has taken her brotherly lust. It's an incestuous subplot that would make John Irving proud, and one McCarthy has used before - the last time he placed a woman at the centre of a book (Rinthy in Outer Dark is pregnant with her brother's child). Alicia works in "topos theory", at the sharp frontier of mathematical thought. In case readers miss the analogy, her last name is Western. And like the grand dream of the American west, our beautiful heroine is doomed. Grieving for her brother, and disillusioned by maths, Alicia is destined to kill herself (in the opening scene of The Passenger, McCarthy describes her dangling body like a gruesome Christmas bauble). With no prospect of hope, Stella Maris is the literary equivalent of a snuff film - a slow-motion study in obliteration. "I've always had the idea that I didn't want to be found," Alicia explains. "That if you died and nobody knew about it that would be as close as you could get to never having been here in the first place." Alicia's conversations with Dr Cohen are combative, cerebral and theory-heavy (Kant, Wittgenstein, Feynman, Gödel): less a therapeutic dialogue than a Platonic one. The questions the pair tackle range from the eternal (is the self an illusion?); to the mind-knotting (if mathematical objects exist independent of human thought, what else are they independent of?); to the hazy, late-night realm of the weed-addled (why is a dying dolphin's last breath not considered an act of suicide?). It would be funny if this book were not so certain of its own cleverness. "I want to be revered," Alicia declares, "I want to be entered like a cathedral." It feels like a tacit instruction for readers. And it's working; the critical reception of McCarthy's late-act duo has been steeped - largely - in lit-bro awe. But Alicia is less a character than a receptacle, a dumping ground for eight decades of snarled (and snarling) ideas. As her conversations with Dr Cohen deepen, she slips into McCarthy's own narrative voice, with all its rococo cadences and tell-tale tics ("olivedrab", "moonminded", "girljuice"). It's a grotesque kind of irony that the author's most risible creation is the closest thing he's given us to an avatar. "If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be?" Dr Cohen asks Alicia. "It would be this," she answers. "The world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy." It's textbook McCarthy nihilism, boiled down to a noxious concentrate: no country for old mathematicians. And if it once felt daring - the dust-hearted cruelty, the cosmic indifference - it now feels trite. Perhaps that's the true McCarthy mythos: he spent his career staring into the void, and now it's staring back.
Kirkus Review
A companion to McCarthy's The Passenger that both supplements and subverts it. Alice Western--now known as Alicia, her birth certificate changed via her brother's counterfeiter pal, John Sheddan--is a brilliant mathematician, at work on a doctorate even as a teenager. Her mind has melted, though. In this series of dialogues with a psychiatrist, she reveals herself to be thoroughly self-aware: "Mental illness is an illness. What else to call it? But it's an illness associated with an organ that might as well belong to Martians for all our understanding of it." Still, the seemingly very real friend she calls the Thalidomide Kid turns out to be one of many hallucinations that show up to keep Alicia company--an interesting turn, since it seems the Kid also visited her brother, Bobby, in the predecessor novel. Is Bobby's life also a hallucination, a dream? Perhaps, for Alicia suggests that Bobby may still be lying in a coma following an auto-racing accident in Italy. For Alicia, just 20 years old, mathematics is both a defense and a curse, something she's given up--not easily, for, as she tells Dr. Cohen, "I think maybe it's harder to lose just one thing than to lose everything." One thing that does seem to be uncomfortably real is her incestuous relationship with Bobby, which she reveals to Dr. Cohen in small, enigmatic bits seeded with defiant assertions that her conscience is untroubled: "I knew that I would love him forever. In spite of the laws of Heaven." Some of her defenses melt a little toward the end, when, having revealed some of the cracks in her psyche, she asks Dr. Cohen to hold her hand--because, McCarthy writes in a characteristically gnomic phrase, "that's what people do when they're waiting for the end of something." A grand puzzle, and grandly written at that, about shattered psyches and illicit dreams. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Schizophrenic genius and math prodigy Alicia Western, introduced in McCarthy's novel The Passenger (2022), in which she existed mainly on the periphery, here gets the starring role. Alicia has voluntarily admitted herself into Stella Maris, a facility for the care of psychiatric patients. Capable of understanding, even elucidating the most complex mathematical models, Alicia's brilliance remains undiminished, though her hallucinations have become more pronounced (the lead-in to each chapter in The Passenger describes a different hallucination of Alicia's). The format of Stella Maris is as bold as it is simple, consisting entirely of the conversations Alicia has with her doctor at the facility. Few authors would attempt to present the dialogue of a math genius, yet McCarthy clearly knows his way around Fermat's Theorem. McCarthy demonstrates a unique ability to discuss complex mathematical and philosophical content in literary prose that somehow braids the two cultures. Alicia is a complex and compelling character, who reminds us that the word prodigy comes from the Latin word for monster while she also plumbs her own subconscious. Pair with The Passenger for an optimal reading experience.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: With the earlier release of McCarthy's The Passenger, readers will be primed for this related tale.
Library Journal Review
In 1972, Alicia Western, a PhD candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, checks herself into Stella Maris, a psychiatric hospital in rural Wisconsin, with over $40,000 in cash. She is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. The psychiatrist thinks she is there to talk about her decision to take her brother Bobby off life support. Instead, Alicia begins a meandering discussion about philosophy, mathematics, humanity, religion, ethics, and mental illness. McCarthy's companion novel to The Passenger is a gripping, thought-provoking look at what it means to be human. Narrators Julia Whelan and Edoardo Ballerini give stunning performances as Alicia and her psychiatrist. With a calm, measured tone, Ballerini provides stability, while Whelan embodies a troubled but brilliantly self-aware Alicia as she reveals shocking truths about her life. Listeners will be wholly drawn into Alicia's slippery story where the boundaries of truth and reality become blurred. The audio provides ambiance with well-placed sound effects, such as the clicking of the psychiatrist's tape recorder. VERDICT Libraries will want to purchase this piercing work, not only because of McCarthy's many fans, but also because the audiobook skillfully communicates the depth and beauty of his haunting story.--Elyssa Everling