A few years ago, I happened to be washing my hands next to Mitch McConnell at the end of a gala held in the National Building Museum. My phone buzzed. I picked it up and read the notification: Philip Roth, author of Portnoy’s Complaint, dead at 85. “Philip Roth is dead!” I exclaimed. McConnell didn’t even look up from the sink. He dried his hands and left the bathroom. But I couldn’t contain myself. I felt I had to tell someone who would acknowledge this monumental fact. “Philip Roth is dead!” I told my dining companions. They shrugged. So I called my father. The phone rang and rang. He must have been asleep. I texted him in all caps: PHILIP ROTH IS DEAD. When he read the message the next morning, he did not reply.
I can’t blame him. What was there to say, anyway? By the time Roth’s heart failed, few people were thinking about him. The generation of readers that lapped up Portnoy had died off, and, for the most part, younger literary aspirants found his autofictional sexual anxieties unsettling. He fell out of fashion the way most people do: he was old, and in the last decades of his life he couldn’t produce work of the highest quality. The same could be said of the other still-living greats of his generation, whom, along with Roth, Harold Bloom in 2003 named the only “living American novelists I know of who are still at work and who deserve our praise.” Thomas Pynchon is all but retired. Don DeLillo isn’t, but he isn’t really writing novels either. Cormac McCarthy alone has fought on, and in the past few years has been toiling away at a massive novel with which he’s been obsessed for more than half his life.
That novel is something of a legend among McCarthy’s fans. It is said that he began work on it in the 1980s, when he told his publisher that he was writing about a brother and sister living New Orleans. He kept quiet about it for the next twenty-five years. After the success of The Road, he mentioned during an interview that his next book would be largely about a young woman who committed suicide in the mid-1970s and her brother who is still coping with her death in the early 1980s. McCarthy admitted the work was frustrating: “I was planning on writing about a woman for fifty years,” he said. “I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.” He didn’t mention the book again until 2015, when he read some passages from a novel tentatively titled The Passenger at the Santa Fe Institute, where he is a fellow. A rumor spread that the new novel’s publication was imminent. A former professor of mine, who has been reading McCarthy since well before Oprah’s book club and the film version of No Country for Old Men made him a household name, said that he developed a daily habit of refreshing McCarthy’s author page on Knopf’s website. He did this for about three years before giving up and sighing, “He’s just been silent for too long.”
When at last The Passenger was announced this March, Knopf billed it as “a worldwide literary event,” teasing the novel as a grotesque thriller built around erudite investigations into mathematics and metaphysics. But the publisher also mentioned that about a month later, there would appear another, much shorter book, Stella Maris, a sort of thematic coda to The Passenger. It became clear immediately that what was presented as a triumph was in actuality a tragedy. McCarthy is nearly ninety, and this likely was his last chance at having real control over something published under his name. If his few comments on the writing process are any guide, packaging up and selling a messy draft as two little books was not his first choice. But it was his choice, ultimately, either because he was unable to take edits or simply refused. McCarthy is a notoriously obstinate man, driven by ego and averse to criticism. His editor at Knopf remarked several years ago that if a manuscript is “as Cormac wants it, that’s how it stays.”
That’s a privilege that every novelist wants—until he really needs help. But McCarthy has always rejected guidance of any sort. In his telling, he doesn’t need it. Since childhood, he has been out on his own. “I remember in grammar school the teacher asked if anyone had any hobbies,” he said once. “I was the only one with any hobbies, and I had every hobby there was. There was no hobby I didn’t have, name anything, no matter how esoteric, I had found it and dabbled in it. I could have given everyone a hobby and still had forty or fifty to take home.” When he was granted a MacArthur Fellowship, he bragged that he was the only person who attended every annual meeting, where he made a point of shunning his fellow writers in favor of real geniuses, the scientists who invented the atomic bomb. These days, at the Santa Fe Institute, he’s insulated from anyone he considers intellectually inferior, instead spending his time with physicists exploring new ways to blow up the world and mathematicians studying the incomprehensibility of human existence. He looks down on anyone whose work doesn’t “deal with issues of life and death” constantly. Especially novelists. “I don’t understand them,” he remarked of Proust and Henry James. “To me, that’s not literature.” And to him, very little is. There’s Dostoevsky, Faulkner, and Melville—but in truth, literature is not one of McCarthy’s hobbies. “Of all the subjects I’m interested in, it would be extremely difficult to find one I wasn’t.” he said. “Writing is way, way down at the bottom of the list.”
For a long while, most people assumed he was just posturing or that this disdain was some massive inside joke. After all, McCarthy has done absurd things for his craft. His first four novels, all Southern Gothic tales, were written when he was homeless (or very near to it), and supported solely by the women who doted on him. “Cormac just shuts himself up in his room and writes,” his second wife, Anne De Lisle, remarked in 1968 as she cataloged for a newspaper in Tennessee her attempts at housekeeping in the barn they were squatting in at the time. Decades later, she recalled that there were long stretches when McCarthy refused to leave his desk for any reason: “Someone would call up and offer him two thousand dollars to come speak at a university about his books,” she said. “And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.” But his intense focus at the expense of everything else seems to have paid off. Of those novels, Suttree is McCarthy’s best, second only to Blood Meridian, the first novel, McCarthy claims, to take cowboys “seriously” in two hundred years. To this day, McCarthy won’t work any other way. He has never held a day job and has never fulfilled an obligation that he finds annoying (he divorced all three of his wives). “I’ve always been horrified by the way people live their lives,” he said of the regularly housed and employed. “I’m basically very selfish and want to enjoy life. I always have a good time.”
In short, McCarthy is a dilettante. A very talented one, but a dilettante nonetheless. This, I found, was the best way to read The Passenger and especially Stella Maris, books that aren’t really about anything except McCarthy’s hobbies. The Passenger begins with a plane plunging into the Gulf of Mexico. The divers who are sent from New Orleans to salvage it sense something is missing, a body, perhaps. A few days later, one of them, Bobby Western, receives an unexpected visit from some unidentified government agents. There are warnings, more disappearances. But Bobby ignores them, instead receding into himself, grieving the death of his sister, Alicia, and trying to forget his father’s involvement in the Manhattan Project. As Bobby drifts along in memory, McCarthy revisits a number of his favorite topics—the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Kennedy assassinations, incest between siblings—without much effort made to tell a story. The whole book is shot through with flashbacks to Alicia’s schizophrenic final days. At the end, Bobby, having fled the IRS, lies down to rest on a Spanish beach and dreams about his own death, “the last pagan on earth, singing softly upon his pallet in an unknown tongue.” The plane is forgotten, and the passenger, too.
All this of course is presented in McCarthyese, a strange register of English whose dialogue favors dramatic understatement, as in this exchange between Bobby and a hermit on the bayou:
Somewhere out here the last ivorybill died. Thirty years ago probably. I still listen for them. What sense does that make? They’re gone forever.
I didnt know you were a bird watcher.
I’m not. I’m a forever watcher.
Forever is a long time.
And whose descriptive passages, often apocalyptic in tone, run in long strings of clipped sentences, as in Bobby’s account of Nagasaki in 1945:
Everything looked covered with rust. There were burnt-out shells of trolleycars standing in the streets. The glass melted out of the sashes and pooled on the bricks. Seated on the blackened springs the charred skeletons of the passengers with their clothes and hair gone and their bones hung with blackened strips of flesh. Their eyes boiled from their sockets. Lips and noses burned away. Sitting in their seats laughing. The living walked about but there was no place to go. They waded by the thousands into the river and died there. They were like insects in that no one direction was preferable to another. Burning people crawled among the corpses like some horror in a vast crematorium. They simply thought that the world had ended. It hardly even occurred to them that it had anything to do with the war. They carried their skin bundled up in their arms before them like wash that it not drag in the rubble and ash and they passed one another mindlessly on their mindless journeyings over the smoking afterground, the sighted no better served than the blind. The news of all this did not even leave the city for two days. Those who survived would often remember these horrors with a certain aesthetic to them. In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years. Like an immense bladder, they would say. Like some sea thing. Wobbling slightly on the near horizon. Then the unspeakable noise. They saw birds in the dawn sky ignite and explode soundlessly and fall in long arcs earthward like burning party favors.
Both forms of McCarthyese become exhausting after a hundred pages and almost unreadable after four hundred. Stella Maris isn’t much of a relief from The Passenger. It’s an experimental book—never an encouraging sign from an octogenarian—in which the scenario of its predecessor is reversed. Now Bobby is dead (or so it seems at the time), and Alicia is grieving him in a mental hospital in Wisconsin. The book is composed entirely of the dialogue transcripts of her therapy sessions. Here, for almost two hundred pages, McCarthy blends, in the voice of Alicia, his typical laconic nihilism with speculations about higher mathematics, his fascination of the past fifteen years. McCarthy said that, try as he might, he would never be able to inhabit the mind of a woman, and Stella Maris is proof positive of this self-assessment. When Alicia is not rambling about Kurt Gödel or Wittgenstein, she’s fantasizing about incest, in a manner that comes more naturally to men than women.
All could be forgiven, maybe, if McCarthy wrote about his math kick in an entertaining, or at the very least comprehensible, manner. Instead, he spits out page after page of figures, charts, and theories. And most of the time, he’s working in high McCarthyese, which results, on the descriptive side, in hilariously overwrought scenes, such as this biographical sketch of Alexander Gröthendieck:
He set out to rewrite all of algebraic geometry. He only got through about a third of it. Several thousand pages. But he changed mathematics fundamentally. He led the Bourbaki group but in the end they couldnt follow him. Or wouldnt. Their mathematics was grounded in set theory which was beginning to look more and more porous—and he’d moved a good bit beyond that. To a whole new level of logical abstraction. A new way of looking at the world. He was completing what Riemann started. To unseat Euclid forever. Ignoring for now the Fifth Postulate. The intrusion of infinity which Euclid couldnt deal with. When you get to topos theory you are at the edge of another universe. You have found a place to stand where you can look back at the world from nowhere. It’s not just some gestalt. It’s fundamental.
And in terms of dialogue, completely ridiculous crosstalk, such as this exchange between Alicia and her doctor:
What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.
Beauty in mathematics.
Yes.
Is that a part of its description? Is that what makes it true?
Profound equations are often said to be beautiful. Maxwell I suppose. If you overlook the E and B vector potential in place of the A. If you look into the principle of least action you are likely to be left rather solemnly silent.
I could go on like this at length. But the point here is that as McCarthy approaches ninety, he is also entering a second childhood of sorts, one where he plays at his hobbies all day, without a worry for his work.
