Twenty-one.
Didnt he have girlfriends?
He tried. It never came to anything. I wasnt jealous. I wanted him to see other girls. I wanted him to see the truth of his situation.
That he was in love with you.
Yes. Bone of his bone. Too bad. We were like the last on earth. We could choose to join the beliefs and practices of the millions of dead beneath our feet or we could begin again. Did he really have to think about it? Why should I have no one? Why should he? I told him that I'd no way even to know if there was justice in my heart if I had no one to love and love me. You cannot credit yourself with a truth that has no resonance. Where is the reflection of your worth? And who will speak for you when you are dead?
Alicia Western is an outlier: a brilliant mathematician, a musician of genius--though not top ten in the world, sadly--and beautiful to boot. But her life is wrecked: bereft at the apparent loss of her brother, lying in a coma in France, she returns to Stella Maris, a mental institution in Wisconsin where she's committed herself twice before. It seems unlikely that it will be able to give her what she's looking for, even if she knew what that was. Stella Maris takes the form of a long dialogue between Alicia and a doctor at the institution.
Some of the things she tells him we know already, if we've read The Passenger, the "first" of the two companion novels McCarthy released last year: Alicia has a mathematical mind that rivals only that of super-genius Alexander Grothendieck, her idol; greater than even her brother, who is also a kind of genius. We know that she is in love with her brother, and feels no compunction about the incest taboo. We know that she is harried by visions of a Vaudevillian dwarf she calls the Thalidomide Kid and his band of performers. If we have read The Passenger, we know some things also that Alicia and Dr. Cohen do not yet know: that Alicia will commit suicide, that Bobby will wake up from his coma. But Stella Maris signals to the reader how badly Alicia's voice--clever, cruel, desperate--was missing from that other novel. We hear more about the mathematics that Bobby, turned deep sea salvager, only touches on, and we learn the depth of Alicia's despair.
All that math stuff, is there something to it, or is it only the rendition of a dilettante and wordcel? It certainly doesn't have the ring of mathematical perception that, say, Benjamin Labatut's When We Cease to Understand the World does, but as a dilettante of a much higher order I suppose it's not for me to say. (Does it keep McCarthy up at night to think his are the second and third best books of the past few years to feature Grothendieck?) For McCarthy, who recently wrote about the theory that language developed as a kind of parasite--a claim repeated by Alicia in Stella Maris--math is a way of searching for the elusive heart of reality, purer than words, and yet Alicia seems unconvinced that numbers are any more "real" than words.
After Godel, all mathematicians must face the reality that even mathematics cannot describe the world with accuracy and wholeness; what Stella Maris suggests, in typical McCarthy fashion, is that this is perhaps a lesser horror than what we would find if we were able to see and describe the world. Alicia tells Dr. Cohen of her childhood vision of "the Archatron," a malicious figure who lives in a realer world behind gates of falsehoods. (To call this gnostic, like much of McCarthy's worldview, is a cliche that remains frustratingly accurate.) She insists over and over that the Kid has his own kind of reality and does not emerge from within her; does he come from somewhere like the Archatron's realm?
It strikes me that Stella Maris is, on some level, about the relationship between genius and non-genius. McCarthy's spent the last couple decades hanging out among professional atom-smashers in New Mexico, and presumably he knows a thing or two about geniuses and what they are like. Alicia's knowledge is like a curse, partially because she perceives more than others, and partially because she understands the limits of her own perception better than anyone else can. She returns to Stella Maris looking for someone, perhaps, to talk to, and though Dr. Cohen is insightful and articulate--McCarthy does well to give him a life of his own, and make him something more than a Socratic prompter, though not much more--they both he will never wholly understand what he has to tell him. It's the reason she lusts for her brother; he's the only person in the world that shares her intellectual atmosphere. When they are together, she reasons, they have moved into a place beyond taboo, beyond society. The fact that he is a little less genius than she may account for his reluctance to follow her into that place. Though Stella Maris has not been all that well received, it seems to me that making Alicia's genius believable is no small authorial feat.
On its own, Stella Maris is--well, not bad, but unsatisfying. It's slight, underdone; constricted by the need to remain in dialogue. Sometimes, when Alicia stops talking like Alicia and starts talking like Cormac, the seams show. But at the same time, it's almost impossible to imagine it being incorporated into The Passenger without making it unbalanced or redundant. In the end, the double novel seems to have been the right choice. The Passenger speaks to Stella Maris and Stella Maris speaks back to The Passenger. I said I think that we'd be grappling with The Passenger for a long time, and while I can't say that I think Stella Maris is a great novel, I don't think it'll be jettisoned, because together the two books seem more to me than the sum of their wholes.
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