Cormac McCarthy gets real
Author takes on time and reality in ‘The Passenger’ and ‘Stella Maris’
For decades, novelist Cormac McCarthy has steeped himself in esoteric subjects like quantum physics, the philosophy of mathematics and theories about the origins of intelligence and the nature of consciousness.
McCarthy, 89, is private, but he’s hardly a recluse: He spends much of his time speaking to philosophers and physicists at the Santa Fe Institute, a research center where he serves as a trustee.
“He’s a permanent fixture in our community,” said David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist and professor at the institute who has become friends with McCarthy. “He’s been living exclusively with theorists for at least 25 years. That is his environment.”
Now those obsessions are seeping into McCarthy’s fiction. “The Passenger,” which Knopf published late last month, and “Stella Maris,” coming on Dec. 6, are his first novels in 16 years, and they directly tackle the thorny ideas and theories that have long preoccupied him.
The intertwined narratives, which focus on a brilliant, tortured young mathematical prodigy and her brother, represent a stylistic and thematic break for McCarthy. He is known for his blood-soaked morality tales set in the American Southwest, swaggering works like “All the Pretty Horses” and “No Country for Old Men,” and for his spare postapocalyptic epic, “The Road.”
The novels tell the tragic story of Bobby and Alicia Western, siblings who are haunted by their physicist father’s role in the development of the atomic bomb — and by their romantic longing for each other. At nearly 400 pages, “The Passenger” reads at times like a thriller, albeit a digressive, metaphysical one. Set mostly in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 1980, it follows Bobby, who works as a salvage diver and discovers something suspicious in the wreckage of a sunken jet. After his co-worker turns up dead, he is trailed by strange men in suits and goes on the run. He sheds his identity but can’t escape his past, and he is tormented by memories of Alicia, a mentally unstable genius who killed herself.
“Stella Maris” unfolds in 1972 at a mental institution in Wisconsin, where Alicia has been admitted and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She is suicidal and hears voices that manifest as characters from a vaudevillian nightmare, including
the Kid, a foul-mouthed dwarf with flippers for hands. The story unfolds as dialogue between Alicia and her doctors, as she describes how her pursuit of revolutionary mathematical theories brought her to the brink of madness.
While the Westerns’ doomed love story drives the narratives, McCarthy seems most interested in his characters’ ideas about the nature of time and reality. Characters debate byzantine concepts like S-Matrix theory, string theory and the general relativistic theory of gravitation, and they discuss the ideas of pioneering physicists like Gerard ‘t Hooft, Sheldon Glashow, Ludwig Boltzmann, Richard Feynman and George Zweig, a particle physicist who has corresponded with McCarthy and read his latest work.
The novels are wildly different from anything he’s done before. At times, the narratives feel disjointed and bogged down in arcane details and enigmatic concepts, for example, in a passage where Bobby discusses the theories of physicist Steven Weinberg: “Still he figured that if you had these neutrino-nucleon collisions that spun off the W particle and gave you a lepton with the opposite charge you’d have to get a Z particle every once in a while. And since the Z carried no charge this meant that the neutrino coming in would stay a neutrino.”
But the books are also recognizably McCarthy’s, laced with transcendent language and profound insights into human nature.
“It’s a very different sensibility, and yet you couldn’t mistake it for anyone else,” said literary scholar Rick Wallach, one of the founders of the Cormac McCarthy Society, who read advanced copies of the novels. “There’s such richness to what he writes and the way he writes that he’s got all kinds of range to be different from his prior self and still be himself.”
It’s unusual for a writer to take such a creative leap at such a late stage in his career. McCarthy, who published his debut novel, “The Orchard Keeper,” in 1965, has long been recognized as one of America’s greatest living novelists and an heir to Faulkner and Steinbeck.
Though his output is sparse — he’s released just 12 novels in some 60 years — he’s had outsized success. He rose to fame in 1992 with the release of his elegiac Western, “All the Pretty Horses,” which won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2007, he won the Pulitzer Prize for “The Road,” which became a bestseller after Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club. He has had several successful film adaptations made of his books, including “No Country for Old Men,” which won four Academy Awards, including best picture.
For all the accolades, McCarthy seemed allergic to literary fame. He stopped giving interviews and detests talking about his work.
“Of all the subjects I’m interested in,” he told the New York Times in 1992, “writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list.” Through Knopf, he declined interview requests this year.
His reticence hasn’t stopped scholars and literary critics from dissecting his prose and themes. “The Passenger” has been the subject of rumor and intrigue among McCarthy scholars. Many believed the book’s release was imminent nearly 20 years ago, when McCarthy’s publisher announced a new novel was coming. That turned out to be “The Road,” and some scholars feared that McCarthy had abandoned “The Passenger.”
There have been tantalizing previews of the novel since then. Seven years ago, the Santa Fe Institute held a reading of it and a discussion of its themes. (McCarthy attended and appeared onstage at the end.)
Some who have followed McCarthy’s work on “The Passenger” over the years say that he wrestled with the expositions of mathematical and philosophical concepts, and took pains to get the details right. Krakauer, who took part in the 2015 discussion at the institute, said that McCarthy struggled with the material because he wanted to do it justice.
“It took him a long time to feel that he could transmute that very challenging material into an aesthetic object,” Krakauer said. “He likes that labyrinth of difficulty.”