- Stella Maris, by Cormac McCarthy. Picador, $34.99.
With his most recent novel, The Road, published in 2006, Cormac McCarthy has returned to the novel with vigour, publishing two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris in 2022. Some reviewers have considered these two novels together; this review will discuss Stella Maris alone.
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This is a challenging and difficult novel to read. It is an intimate and, at times, perplexing portrait of a young life in danger. Told entirely through the transcripts of a disturbed young woman's psychiatric sessions, it is not a long book and it has no setting other than the treatment room where the psychiatrist and patient meet.
The conversations are rambling, with both sides eager to fill out the time of the session in a manner at least interesting to the patient. The 20-year old woman, Alicia Western, admitted herself to the facility, bringing with her a considerable sum of money. From the beginning of the reader's meeting with Alicia, there is mystery and confusion.
Alicia is a child prodigy who was admitted to university at 14. Taking a degree in two years, she then embarked on a doctorate. Her life is dominated by her love for, and great ability with, mathematics. Much of the conversations involve quite complex ideas about the validity, reality and complexity of mathematics. Innumerate myself, I struggled.
The other main strand of the conversations brings several of the world's greatest recent philosophers to the reader's attention. No author could attempt such writing unless deeply versed and knowledgeable in the subject matter. Even if finding much of these conversations difficult to follow, readers will be impressed with the intellectual tour-de-force McCarthy achieves.
To describe the subject matter of the novel is not to indicate its overwhelming, important and moving themes. Readers witness a young life in considerable turmoil and will hope, I think, that the psychiatric sessions may prove somehow effective. The novelist does give readers an answer to this question.
Alicia has suffered great disturbance in her young life. Her mother died when she was young, her father abandoned her to her grandmother at a young age, her brother Bobby, considerably older, whom she unhealthily adored, dies too. Alicia meditates on grief and longing, on the demands of extraordinary intelligence, and on a life that seems pointless, as is the world as she understands it.
If this makes the novel sound too hard to handle, then this review misleads. It is a profound and deeply moving meditation on what people are searching for in life and how they might make sense of the world we all inhabit. Stella Maris will reward readers who are prepared to put in the hard work.
