Cormac McCarthy – The Road – Comment

 

Avoiding dystopian novels and films is a rule of mine, and has been one, until discovering Cormac McCarthy's 2006 text, The Road. If anything, all I need is to watch and read the news to create a dark mood. Writing about nuclear war over the years is enough for me. Although in The Road, the writing is descriptively sparse, and the images that his prose creates in the mind's eye, anyone interested in serious American literature, should read this book.

The earth, at least in the United States, has turned into a dark, wintry desolation of gray skies and desperate people. We are never told why this is the case, weather from climate change, or the fall out from a nuclear holocaust. Everything across the landscape is covered with ash, and the sun barely lights the sky. This leads me to deduce that they are living in a nuclear winter.

Our two main characters are the Man and his young child, we know as Son. They're on the road headed west toward a warmer climate and the sea. They push a shopping cart filled with blankets and a variety of canned goods, including a pistol that holds only two bullets. Most of the novel is the two coming across abandoned houses and buildings searching for food and anything that will aid their survival.

The young lad has a great amount of compassion and empathy for his fellow human beings. A few times along their journey, they come across another traveling poor soul. While the Man is suspicious and aggressive toward the stranger, the little boy always cries out to his father to help them and share what little food they have left.

The boy constantly asks his father if they are 'the good guys', and those they come across are 'the bad guys.' The Man assures his son they are reasonable, carrying a light. The light is a metaphor for hope in a hopeless existence.

After sometime, they come across a parade of travelers fitted in scarves and gas masks. Despite hiding, they're confronted, where one of the men goes to grab the boy, and the Man shoots him in the head. Now he only has one bullet left – that he uses at the end of the tale. All their supplies have been stolen, and with persistence, over time, they recover a few items. People have resorted to cannibalism to eat and remain alive.

Because of the ash-filled atmosphere, Man's health is deteriorating at a fast rate. As the reader we understand that his time is limited.

To be sure, nothing about this novel provides hope. Unless, perhaps, the boy's instinct for empathy and compassion that sees our future generations hold onto what makes us human – our humanity.  

Cormac McCarthy – Stella Maris – Comment

 

Stella Maris is McCarthy's coda to The Passenger. The title is the name of the mental institution that the protagonist of The Passenger, Bobby Western's sister, Alicia Western admitted herself into with only a toothbrush and grocery bag containing $40,000. We are introduced to Alicia Western in the first novel, visited by a character called the Kid: a hallucination of an individual who is deformed with flippers for hands and a childish, sarcastic sense of humor. The Kid's comments, though idiotic at times, reveal the source of madness in Alicia's mind. We soon discover that Alicia Western has been in this institution twice before, diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.

Stella Maris reads more like a screenplay because the entire novel is the recorded therapy session between Alicia and her psychiatrist.

One should read The Passenger before embarking on this novel. An astute reader aware of high mathematics, physics, and philosophy would find these discussions fascinating. Anyone with little knowledge of these subjects will have difficulty reading this slim volume.

Alicia Western is a genius whose intelligence borders on the otherworldly. She was accepted to the University of Chicago at the age of 14. However, because of her groundbreaking work in mathematics, she flies to Paris to study with another genius in the field.

The Western family carries a "curse" of sorts, as Bobby and Alicia's father, another physicist, worked with Oppenheimer on the Atomic bomb. Re-reading the text, I don't believe this to be true, but a product of Bobby and Alicia's own minds. Both children are brilliant, and I believe they carry their own guilt regarding the bomb and its diabolical use on Japan in 1945.

The loneliness of genius is well expressed in Alicia and Bobby's behavior in both novels. Particularly Alicia, who writes 3 drafts of her thesis, that only her brother has read. She escapes the academic world, working in some mid-western bar and a grungy hotel. All the while, she continues to work on the mathematics in her mind. At this point, she stops writing anything down because she believes that doing so prevents the ideas from expanding and growing toward any solution or conclusion. Through this time, the Kid and his collection of vaudevillian characters continue to visit Alicia.

In The Passenger, Bobby and Alicia's close and unusual relationship are explored at some length. We see that this deep love between siblings is nonsexual from Bobby's perspective. Although in Stella Maris, the feeling Alicia has for her brother transcends spiritual love, bordering on the physical, that is never consummated.

This relationship and the love these two people have for each other reaches the very core of their being. These two ultra-intelligent people are incredibly lonely, finding a rare solace in each other. A disturbing relationship, certainly not run of the mill, though understandable, and ultimately a genuine tragedy.

If you have read The Passenger, reading Stella Maris is necessary; however one of the saddest tales one can read.

Cormac McCarthy – The Passenger – Comment

 

There are novels that a reader can read, enjoy and move on without a second thought about the story. Then there are Cormac McCarthy novels that, after turning the last page, the characters, ideas, and themes can sometimes haunt you for weeks. The Passenger is one such text. Many had great expectations for the publication of this novel. Mainstream critics mostly had mixed emotions. Comparing The Passenger to his other novels like the masterpiece, Blood Meridian, is a disservice to his current novel. More so, making comparisons to earlier novels reveals a critic's laziness, and a refusal to delve into its embedded propositions and ideas. McCarthy's latest stands alone, and dare I say a masterpiece?

The novel opens strangely. A woman is in bed to awaken to a band of sideshow entertainers led by a character called The Kid. We see that he's deformed with flippers for hands and a childish, sarcastic sense of humor. The woman seems to know these characters and is reluctant to speak with them out of boredom. Only later do we discover that these are the woman's hallucinations as she suffers from Paranoid Schizophrenia. She is also the younger sister of the novel's main protagonist, Robert Western.

It's 1980 in Mississippi, where Bobby Western is part of a diving team hired to salvage sunken ships and planes. The plane lays unusually flat under the water, and the dive team must break into the wreckage, to find 9 bodies strapped in their seats; missing is the pilot's Flight bag and the aircraft's Black Box. More mysterious is the flight manifest recorded 10 passengers – and strangely, there is a passenger missing.

As the plot unfolds, we find out that Western is a physicist, a few months shy of his PhD from Cal Tech. He's an extremely resourceful and intelligent man who has an array of peculiar friends. After the mysterious plane dive, Western is visited by the FBI. Always suspicious, they ask Western if he had taken anything from the wreckage and other vague questions. Later his room is broken into, and his old cat is traumatized, so he moves to another room above a bar down the street.

For reasons that the reader is unaware of, the “Feds” continue to harass Western, and eventually freeze his bank accounts and impound his car. It's then he goes on the lam.

Because Western's father was one of the scientists that created the Atomic Bomb, this could well be a black mark on his family, causing undue attention from “The Feds”.

Over a third of the novel is devoted to Alicia Western and her interactions with her hallucinations. Alicia Western is a mathematical prodigy, accepted at the University of Chicago at the age of 13. It is hinted that the young woman is much more than a genius, almost having an otherworldly intelligence. Connecting to 'normal' people is impossible. Alicia's only real connection is to her brother, Bobby.

The central theme of The Passenger is the intense love that Western and his sister have for each other. One could say this love transcends passion for it consumes Western all through his life. He feels guilty he wasn't there for her when she decided to end her life. The notions of loss and love and the purpose of existence are explored at length in the text.

At face value, the love Western has for his sister is disturbing, because it's unusual. This was not a sexual relationship, but a spiritual connection, that our protagonist feels to his core.

The vast majority of the tale is Western and his many friends in conversation over dinner and/or drinks, discussing all the unanswerable questions regarding society, God, Love, Quantum physics, and the existential questions of life. These dialogues were fascinating, and confusing, especially Quantum theory.

These questions are never answered, yet that dark cloud of nothingness and lack of meaning hangs over us like the never-ending empty void that is life.

McCarthy's signature elegant, no-nonsense prose throughout The Passenger borders on the beautiful.

A pleasure and privilege to read.