Cormac McCarthy’s Literary Flame Burns Bright and Clear in Two New Works
“Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting,” a character observes in Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses, and it’s this tug between desires—erotic, aspirational, spiritual—and stone-cold reality that arcs through McCarthy’s decades-long career. Now 89, he’s tapped the vernacular roots of our language, improvising on the mythmaking of Faulkner, the cadences of Joyce, and the King James Bible. He’s enigmatic and elusive, a Catholic raised in Protestant-centric Tennessee, who traded in an altar boy’s faith for a “small c” catholic investigation into the nature of the universe. His sentences—lyrical, electrifying, indifferent to punctuation—are often imitated, never equaled. He’s the cool flame beneath the hot boil of our era.
That flame burns bright and clear in two new works, his first since The Road, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize and an Oprah’s Book Club selection: The Passenger, wondrous in its architecture (and its strangeness), and a companion piece, Stella Maris, an edgy, minimalist novella. McCarthy has always been haunted by the horizon line between morality and mortality, and here he offers his own retrospective, a circus of tormented souls and schizophrenic chimeras aligned with his earlier Gothic novels.
A generation after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one atomic scientist’s grown children, Bobby and Alicia Western, must confront the horrific legacy of the nuclear age. Here be monsters: a wise guy known as the Thalidomide Kid (with flippers instead of hands) and his vaudevillian troupe of dwarfs, minstrels; and Miss Vivian, who weeps a lot and wears a stole made of ferrets.
The Kid—star of Alicia’s hallucinations, whom Bobby glimpses once—alludes to “the Kid” from Blood Meridian. Bobby’s drinking pals in the French Quarter nod to the outcasts in Suttree. The surname “Western” is a hat-tip to McCarthy’s Border Trilogy. The hint of incest references his second novel, Outer Dark. Bobby’s odyssey across the United States—behind the wheel of a Maserati, on foot in the Rocky Mountains, deep-sea diving in the Mississippi River—evokes the journey of physician and son in The Road. And at the end of the line, the Kid awaits.
McCarthy’s art is transcendent even as it takes no prisoners. His work will enthrall us into the future, even as it frightens, flummoxes, bewitches.
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