Cormac McCarthy Stumps in Florida

The quantum mechanics of last novels.

Review of The Passenger, Stella Maris published by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Penguin Random House

In memory of Cormac Roth who told me the first night we met at Bennington that he was named after Cormac McCarthy.

It’s an odd phenomenon having read everything a writer’s ever published. It smacks of puberty and the sudden, embarrassed intimacy with your parents’ tics and foibles. Martin Amis’s male characters, for instance, enjoy a boisterous, splashy hummer (you know, a while you’re down there, a nose dive, a honk on the ol’ bagpipe). His inherent (if not iterative) “philo-semitism,” the strength of Time’s Arrow and the unsung Zone of Interest, could not be extinguished even by his House of Meetings, which in Amis’s long phylum of philo’s features his most cramped attempt to remind the reader of his glimmering morality: its nameless narrator gaily, guiltlessly rapes and murders his way through half of Europe pausing only to express, at random intervals, a naive incredulity at the very possibility of anti-semitism. That is, Amis overplays a calling card and fashions a contentedly evil man who cannot fathom, well, evil, and winds up like the author and many of his leading men: obsessively, predictably in love with a Jewish beauty.[1] Vladimir Nabokov, on the other hand, was more orderly with his twin flame and flaw, and created an entire genus to contain them: nymph-, as in the nymphets of half a dozen novels and novellas and the Nymphalidae, Satyrinae, or wood nymph butterflies of his lepidoptery.

            Blowjobs, philo-semitism, nymphets, butterflies—these literary themes are of course not in themselves flaws, but upon their sixth or seventh iteration our reflexive eye-rolls begin describing the outline, in the distance, of a boundary coming into disappointing focus: the writer, our hero, our parent, has limits. There is a horizon beyond which they will not be going and beyond which they will not be taking us with them, page in hand. But we must master this disappointment, because parents do not live forever and we ourselves are not patternless. There is a lot to learn from last novels and the fading shimmers of their well-wrought patterns.

            So what stands out about 89-year old Cormac McCarthy’s latest (last?) work of fiction, The Passenger and its diminutive, incestuous (though not quite scandalously enough) little sister Stella Maris? It’s not a well-worn bushwack or a refurbished saddle, but its new terrains—that is, a break in McCarty’s familiar landscapes. As well we McCarthyites might’ve hoped, for with The Road’s publication in 2006 the outline of McCarthy’s corpus had come into the completed, satisfying shape of a mountain with two distinct climes: Blood Meridian capped the ascending peak, and The Road waited at its foot. What more could be said, putting our packs down, unlacing our hiking boots?