The Verities

The Passenger
A novel by Cormac McCarthy

Stella Maris
A novel by Cormac McCarthy

Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2022

The late Cormac McCarthy was acknowledged by critics and fellow writers as a master of English prose. Critic Harold Bloom called Blood Meridian (1985) "… the greatest single book since Faulkner's As I Lay Dying." The Coen brothers’ adaptation of No Country For Old Men (2005) won four Academy Awards.

The Passenger and Stella Maris share characters: Alicia and Bobby Western, siblings whose parents were involved in The Manhattan Project during and after World War II. Bobby, the older brother who was a physics major before dropping out of college, is a salvage diver who becomes involved with a mysterious government agency after discovering that a sunken plane is missing its flight recorder, and one of its passengers. Alicia is a math genius who also leaves college and ends up in an institution, haunted by phantasms and consumed by love for her brother. The deeds of their deceased father, who was a confidant of Oppenhiemer and was implemental in creation of nuclear weapons, shadows both of them.

The Passenger’s plot shifts between Bobby’s misadventures and Stella’s hallucinations. The linear narrative is secondary to discussions about the great truths of life and death, with occasional moments of hilarity. The book peters out and at the end nothing is resolved as   Bobby ponders the verities of life and death in a run-down café in rural Mexico.

Stella Maris, on the other hand, is a series of dialogs between Alicia and her psychiatrist, conversations concerning math and physics, the unconscious and the ‘Archatron’. This is heady stuff but made palatable by McCarthy’s straightforward prose.

Reader beware: McCarthy eschews ordinary punctuation, including quotation marks. I had to pay extra attention, sometimes re-reading sections to figure who was speaking. Apostrophes are also often ignored, the contraction for ‘can not’ becomes ‘cant’, not to be confused with ‘cant’  (hypocritical and sanctimonious talk) a word which he also uses! You might want to read these with a cup of coffee, rather than a glass of wine. These novels aren’t as violent as some of his others, but they remain disturbing.

Qualified recommendation.