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dr_henrywatson 's review for:
Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy
Spoilers for both *Stella Maris* and *The Passenger*
*Stella Maris* consists of 7 sessions between a psychiatrist and Alice Western, a mathematics savant on an inevitable road towards suicide. This coda to *The Passenger* also recontextualizes that book: Alice tells her psychiatrist that her brother, Bobby, is in a coma after a racing crash. She believes he will never wake up, even saying that he is “brain dead” at one point. Did Bobby miraculously wake up? Or is the at-times dreamlike nature of *The Passenger* a reflection of Bobby’s comatose state, drifting towards death?
The book is entirely written in dialogue, and Cormac McCarthy’s dialogue dispenses with quotation marks or “he said” “she said”. Thankfully, Alice Western and Dr. Cohen have vivid voices. You can tell who is talking from a single sentence, which makes the book reasonably easy to follow, but is also a testament to McCarthy’s talent as a writer. This is a book of philosophical musings, some of which went over my head, but I think I got the gist.
Alice’s brilliant understanding of mathematics has not brought her peace or joy, but rather something closer to dread. Her intelligence has led her only deeper into despair, contemplating questions such as “When all trace of our existence is gone, for whom then will this be a tragedy?”
The passages in *Stella Maris* that discuss Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb were very interesting to me. The A-bomb represents a loss of innocence on a global scale, and a catastrophic result of mankind’s growing intelligence. “Anyone who doesn’t understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasn’t been paying attention. It’s up there with fire and language.” This connects to Alice’s grim notion that “there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been…And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.” When Alice dives deep into her subconscious, her deep thinking only leads her to a similar horrific presence, locked behind a gate: “The Archatron”. This hammers home something that McCarthy himself seems to be struggling with: there’s little joy to be found in a scientific/mathematical understanding of the world.
While all this is pretty bleak, I’m brought back to a line I marked in *The Passenger*: “Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.” We can’t think our way out of despair — and indeed intelligence may lead us deeper into that hole — but we can still choose a different path.
*Stella Maris* consists of 7 sessions between a psychiatrist and Alice Western, a mathematics savant on an inevitable road towards suicide. This coda to *The Passenger* also recontextualizes that book: Alice tells her psychiatrist that her brother, Bobby, is in a coma after a racing crash. She believes he will never wake up, even saying that he is “brain dead” at one point. Did Bobby miraculously wake up? Or is the at-times dreamlike nature of *The Passenger* a reflection of Bobby’s comatose state, drifting towards death?
The book is entirely written in dialogue, and Cormac McCarthy’s dialogue dispenses with quotation marks or “he said” “she said”. Thankfully, Alice Western and Dr. Cohen have vivid voices. You can tell who is talking from a single sentence, which makes the book reasonably easy to follow, but is also a testament to McCarthy’s talent as a writer. This is a book of philosophical musings, some of which went over my head, but I think I got the gist.
Alice’s brilliant understanding of mathematics has not brought her peace or joy, but rather something closer to dread. Her intelligence has led her only deeper into despair, contemplating questions such as “When all trace of our existence is gone, for whom then will this be a tragedy?”
The passages in *Stella Maris* that discuss Oppenheimer and the atomic bomb were very interesting to me. The A-bomb represents a loss of innocence on a global scale, and a catastrophic result of mankind’s growing intelligence. “Anyone who doesn’t understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasn’t been paying attention. It’s up there with fire and language.” This connects to Alice’s grim notion that “there was an ill-contained horror beneath the surface of the world and there always had been…And that to imagine that the grim eruptions of this century were in any way either singular or exhaustive was simply a folly.” When Alice dives deep into her subconscious, her deep thinking only leads her to a similar horrific presence, locked behind a gate: “The Archatron”. This hammers home something that McCarthy himself seems to be struggling with: there’s little joy to be found in a scientific/mathematical understanding of the world.
While all this is pretty bleak, I’m brought back to a line I marked in *The Passenger*: “Suffering is a part of the human condition and must be borne. But misery is a choice.” We can’t think our way out of despair — and indeed intelligence may lead us deeper into that hole — but we can still choose a different path.