Aeons having drifted past since last I posted here, and yet with nothing much to justify a post, I thought why not poke my head in briefly with some bookish sorts of thoughts? I used to do that occasionally! I read Cormac McCarthy’s final two books last week, so that seems like a decent pretext for some Book Talk, eh?
I prepared for this reading over a couple months by going through most of his earlier catalog in the form of audiobooks in my library app. All the pretty narrators were EXCELLENT, by the way—I was mightily impressed! Especially the guy who did Suttree. McCarthy’s prosody is meant for the ear, anyway, methinks. Whether he’s in his ornate, biblical mode or his just-the-facks-ma’am mode, doesn’t matter, they both benefit from that auricular vibrato, an enhancement of mentation with sensation.
The Passenger and Stella Maris, however, I read with my eyes. Having imbibed most of his output now, I have to say his UTTERLY BONKERS Southern Gothic novels are by far the best work. The Westerns are great, don’t get me wrong, but they don’t hold a candle to the Southern novels.
I read and enjoyed Blood Meridian, his first (and best) Western, way back in college and always kept him in mind afterward as someone I would have to get back to, and I guess it took his passing to finally prompt me to follow through on that urge. I did watch and read The Road at some point in the past, but wasn’t much taken with it. Pretty anemic for a post-apocalypse scenario. My theory on that book is that he read Stephen King’s The Stand and wanted to kick back against the religious garbage in there, the literal hand of God reaching down and choosing the winners and losers of humanity after having wiped everyone else out for some reason or other. McCarthy was like, nope, no reason, no God, no externally bestowed Grace, there’s no final battle between Good and Evil, bullshit, whatever happens to us is our own damn fault, and whatever Grace there IS in us is fragile and contingent, ergo, IT’S ON US to safeguard it against destruction and loss. So I appreciate that message, but the vehicle of it was just another tired old nuclear apocalypse, like I haven’t seen a million of those already in this supersaturated entertainment culture of our’n.
But this was going to be about The Passenger / Stella Maris. Ahem. (Before I commence upon my whine-schrift, however, I want to make it clear that I LOVED the books. OKAY? All of his books are amazing, including these ones, even though I’m about to mildly complain about certain aspects. I’m just one of those assholes who complains about shit, but it doesn’t mean I don’t also praise, because I do that, too, when the mood strikes, and the evidence is all over this website if you ever feel like poking around!)
First of all, why was this TWO books? Fucking filthy lucre, that’s why. Two books costs twice as much as one. Artistically, it’s ONE book, straight up, and it wouldn’t be “too long” if it were all in one volume. This isn’t like Lord of the Rings, where it really would’ve been a 1,500-page door stopper heavier than a human child. These two books together aren’t even as long as Suttree. Should’ve been one book. My guess is he was trying to set up his heirs.
Second complaint. Look, he’s an incredible writer, and I thoroughly enjoyed the prose, of course—I sailed through these books, scooped up and gobbled down those rhythms and locutions like gobs of your chef’s finest yogurt concoction. And I loved the science-y stuff, these are all topics I think about constantly myself, but he never USES it for anything more than adornment. Every time Alicia brings it up with her doltish psychotherapist, the conversation just sidesteps away from it, you just get a taste of the good stuff, a soupçon of New Physics here, some flakes of non-Euclidian geometry there, a dash of Kekulé’s dream and maybe some Word Virus for spice, a whole series of glancing disquisitions on incredibly exciting ideas disconnected from any actual events or relationships in the novel… and that’s about it. It’s like somebody’s got a mouthwatering bowl of gigantic gleaming red strawberries, and they offer you ONE bite of ONE strawberry, and that’s it. Taking it back! No more for you!
If you want to see Math and Science successfully integrated into a literary novel, read Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day. He deals with many of the exact same subjects, but they’re actually substantiated and integrated into the plot, the characters, the imagery, the motifs… you know, the LITERARY SHIT. (It’s even got, pace McCarthy, a perpetually horny and superhot female mathematician who’s obsessed with non-Euclidian geometry—an oddly specific fetish among these elderly white male authors, don’t you think?) Furthermore, I DO DECLARE that one of Pynchon’s Perennial Preoccupations is exactly the same as McCarthy’s: how do you protect that fragile flame of Grace (that establishes our humanity) from destruction by the forces of mechanization and abstraction (that emerge from our humanity)? But Pynchon elaborates almost infinitely on this theme—you can’t staunch the flood—whereas McCarthy just kind of wallows around in it. (I’m exaggerating for effect, I don’t deny, just making an observation, don’t SWAT me.)
I promise, I did like these books, I thoroughly enjoyed the act of reading them. McCarthy is full of gorgeous prose and profound musings. But I do have to issue forth with a third complaint. Next to Suttree, The Passenger, its spiritual sequel, is glib, pallid, and insipid. Both books are written from the same formula: a sophisticated, high-born, well-educated fella has turned his back on ALL THAT and taken to living instead (LIKE A MAN) among the romanticized riff-raff, the low-born, just-plain-folks (yet also charmingly eccentric) troglodytes of Society’s lower rungs (who are really the Wise Ones what with them living so close to Nature you know they’re not ANIMALS per se but pretty close), whose rude, alchemic life juice he desperately cultivates to sustain his own vitality. (Constantly “smiling to himself” whenever he has a conversation with them. That smile, that’s his vampire’s kiss: it’s in both Suttree and The Passenger.)
It’s just done so much more colorfully, enjoyably, and expansively in Suttree. The characters have so much more charisma, the events are developed so much more immersively, and the literary rendering of the world is so much more entrancing. The Passenger is skeletal by comparison. My theory is that he started The Passenger around the same time he wrote Suttree, but threw it in the trunk when it didn’t go anywhere, and then he resurrected it more recently when he had the idea of splitting the male character into a dyad: two halves, a brother and a sister, who would be incestuously in love with each other. This is a GREAT idea, I just feel like he didn’t do very much with it. You barely get a sense of their actual relationship. You really only get signals here and there, often just murky and morose reflections in flashbacks, whether from Bobby or Alice, but very little direct light. I think what he was mainly interested in was using Alicia as a vehicle to discuss the math and science ideas that he was apparently obsessed with in his later years.
I found it very intriguing that he imbued Alicia, the female half, with the hyper-rational, disconnected, emotionally alienated, wrathful sky-father qualities, while Bobby was given the intuitive, oceanic, emotionally intelligent, nurturing earth-mother qualities. Maybe he was going for a Yin-Yang deal? Where each contains something of the other? I’m not sure, but it’s certainly worthy of rumination. One thing that’s clear to me is that there is only one protagonist: that brother-sister dyad. Just as there’s only ONE BOOK, you greedy fucks. (When I was a kid, Guns & Roses released a double album in the form of two separate albums: Use Your Illusion I and Use Your Illusion II. What a money grab—and most of THEIR fans were children! What made that sad episode linger for me was hearing Axl Rose in a radio interview explaining that he was actually SAVING these children money because one friend could buy #1, while the other friend could buy #2, and then they could make tapes for each other. And I’m thinking, “That means I’d have a good quality cd with actual cover art and a shitty cassette with handwritten song titles and tape hiss… and it’s not like blank tapes are exactly FREE. Does he really believe what he’s saying?” Of course, nowadays, I understand, Taylor Swift has innovated this grift to another order, with her multiple variations of the same album, a kind of Sierpinski Gasket of an album, just short of requiring her fans to sign loyalty oaths in which they’ll never spend another nickel on the work of any other artist, essentially docking their paychecks in perpetuity to keep her infamous private jets fueled. At least Use Your Illusion was good music. Imagine being stuck with a lifetime subscription to Taylor fucking Swift!)
Complaints and digressions aside, I want to be clear one more time, I love McCarthy’s writing. Why else would I read his entire catalog, right? I’m telling you, I had to CONSTANTLY be rewinding my audiobooks just so I could hear those majestic passages repeated. And he’s got plenty of lovely passages in these last two books, too…. I just get cranky when things fall short of my needs, and none of the reviews I looked up online mentioned any of these issues, so SOMEONE had to say it. Every word McCarthy ever wrote is eminently worth reading, however, if that’s your thing. Not that anyone’s looking for recommendations from ME. Ha ha!
Okay, well, shit, I was going to talk about Don Quixote, too… but I went way overboard on the McCarthy, so maybe some other time. I was VERY surprised by Don Quixote, however, so I hope I manage to come back here and write about him!