The Fate of the Western’s World

Cormac McCarthy, who hadn’t published a novel since 2006, has suddenly become as prolific as James Patterson. October saw the publication of The Passenger, and its companion work, Stella Maris, appeared earlier this month. Reviews of the former have been respectful but not exactly raving. Ron Charles of the Washington Post concludes, “The Passenger casts readers into a black hole of ignorance.” In the New York Times, John Jeremiah Sullivan determines that McCarthy’s style “teeters” into “straight badness” and pretentiousness. And on the website of record, Max Bindernagel calls it a “very good book” that “might be too cerebral for even more dedicated readers.”

The Passenger depicts the wanderings of Bobby Western, a race-car driver turned salvage diver who makes a baffling discovery when exploring a submerged airplane. Soon he’s being pursued by mysterious agents, his assets are frozen, and his passport is revoked, so he goes on the lam. But what Western really finds underwater is a red herring: The novel’s true focus is the wreckage of Bobby’s past, and particularly the grief he feels over the suicide of his sister, Alicia. It is a bold, albeit frustrating, move by McCarthy to bait the reader with a paranoid existential thriller and switch it for an elegiac work about a man mourning his mentally ill sister.

An implausibly beautiful and brilliant paranoid schizophrenic in love with her brother, Alicia appears throughout The Passenger: in the opening paragraph when her dead body is discovered, in Bobby’s memories, and especially in scenes when she hallucinates about a wise-cracking, deformed grotesquerie called the Thalidomide Kid (sometimes, like the protagonist of Blood Meridian, just called the Kid). In Stella Maris, she is elevated to the central voice.

It’s hard to imagine anyone enjoying Stella Maris who hasn’t first read The Passenger; but readers who enjoyed the questions the first work raised and didn’t mind the lack of answers will appreciate this slender companion. The new novel depicts the weeks leading up to Alicia’s suicide in the form of transcripts of her therapy sessions at a clinic in Wisconsin, from which the work gets its title. Over the course of their conversations, Alicia and her therapist, Dr. Cohen—a much less sinister interlocutor than the Kid—discuss her family’s history, her suicidal tendencies, her shameless lust for her brother. And as with The Passenger, there are long passages about quantum mechanics, nuclear engineering, the lives and works of

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