Talking Big

PLOT SPOILERS IN THIS.

And I have it on good authority he doesn’t plan to write any more novels. This is going to be a “the story’s done. Turn the page” moment.

– Rich Wallach, Secretary-Treasurer and founding member of the Cormac McCarthy Society in a reply on the cormacmccarthy.com forums, 11 July 2022 at 9:16 PM.

 The mystery is that there is no mystery.

– Judge Holden 

I won’t be reading Stella Maris until December, so my feeling right now is one of deferral and hesitation. You have to see it all, right? The whole shape of it. It’s only a matter of time. The reviews I’ve read that include Stella Maris have mostly focused on The Passenger. I guess that’s just fine. I’ve read some ugly reviews out there. A few perceptive reviews. It’s not a book I’d read to write a knee jerk review.

I’d have thought The Road would serve any near 75-year-old writer as a summing up. It was that kind of book. That kind of world. He had more to say, though. More to write. Here are some impressions of my first read.

He is still a prose poet of destruction and horror.

If you’ve made it through the Apache wars of Blood Meridian or the wasteland of The Road, you already know McCarthy reaches his highest notes when writing of man-made destruction. Here in The Passenger, he writes two striking sections about the aftermath of atomic bomb explosions. Bobby Western, the novel’s main character, talks often of his father who was a physicist on the Manhattan Project. He is asked about him by a researcher who seems to be writing a book about him. By others who know his family legacy. Here is a long passage about Nagasaki.

There were people who escaped from Hiroshima and rushed to Nagasaki to see that their loved ones were safe. Arriving just in time to be incinerated. He went there after the war with a team of scientists. My father. He said that everything was rusty. Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.

A pretty long passage, I realize now, as I type it out. And a hard one for a empathetic reader. Only as hard, though, as the history it depicts. Americans did this to the people of Japan. Much later in the book, McCarthy returns to some of this imagery in another passage.

His father spoke little to them of Trinity. Mostly he’d read it in the literature. Lying face down in the bunker. Their voices low in the darkness. Two. One. Zero. Then the sudden whited meridian. Out there the rocks dissolving into a slag that pooled over the melting sands of the desert. Small creatures crouched aghast in that sudden and unholy day and then were no more. What appeared to be some vast violet-colored creature rising up out of the earth where it had thought to sleep its deathless sleep and wait its hour of hours.

He liked a bomb that could melt rocks so much, he wrote it twice. That last bit reminds me of the Epilogue of Blood Meridian and the hole digger.

Where did the gold come from?

Bobby Western digs up some old pipes under the stairs in the foundation/basement of his grandmother’s home. They are filled with immaculate gold bars. Enough to make Western and his sister both rich. Did his father sell nuclear secrets?

What on earth is going on with the Thalidomide Kid?

We don’t make the people, we just make the templates, he says. Who does he report to exactly? The entire half of the book with Bobby’s schizophrenic sister, Alicia, and her visits from the Kid and his cohorts is a departure for McCarthy. It’s a Godot or Stoppard sort of funny. Often annoying, but funny, and the interlocutions allow McCarthy to point at aspects of the mind he normally would not take the time to write about. The Kid tells Bobby he’s a split off piece of Alicia’s psyche, aint he? He’s so insistent, it’s natural we wonder.

Similes & Metaphors

What would a Cormac McCarthy book be without them?

Where he walked the tideline at dusk the last red reaches of the sun flared slowly out along the sky to the west and the tidepools stood like spills of blood. He stopped to look back at his bare footprints. Filling with water one by one. The reefs seemed to move slowly in the last hours and the late colors of the sun drained away and then the sudden darkness fell like a foundry shutting down for the night.

Or

The storm was moving in and the lightning flared again. The hot chains of ignition falling broken into the sea.

Unyielding precision

There are piles and piles of tiny stories in this book that seem to reveal McCarthy is not interested in a topic unless he can write about it at an expert level or write about a person that is hyper-competent in a field or pursuit. However earthly or mundane the pursuit. “Expert is the rating that actually means something,” a private investigator says when talking about Lee Harvey Oswald’s marksman rating (Oswald was not an expert-rated marksman). This gets tedious about as quickly as you imagine it does. When he’s sixteen, Bobby Western enters the state science fair and studies a pond near his grandmother’s house. He draws life-size drawings of 273 different creatures that live in the pond habitat. It takes him two years. His sister Alicia who is not only as beautiful as Helen of Troy but is also a math genius who is so smart almost nobody else can understand her level of math ability? Also? She was pretty much a world authority on violins. If you’re going to do something, you might as well shred at it. “Being wrong is the worst thing a physicist can be. It’s up there with being dead.” Etc. Seems to be a part of McCarthy’s personality.

None of the conversations about physicists and physics add up to anything conclusive about the world. Of Alicia Western, the following:

She knew that in the end you really cant know. You cant get hold of the world. You can only draw a picture. Whether it’s a bull on the wall of a cave or a partial differential equation it’s all the same thing.

Perhaps a great revelation awaits us in Stella Maris. Probably not tho. As Judge Holden said, “The mystery is that there is no mystery.”