Cormac McCarthy News

 I saw No Country for Old Men before prison. In prison, my friend Joel C said to read him. I did. I suggest you do the same. He has two noels coming out, probably his last one, so The Guardian profiled him under ‘Whatever I was going to be I wanted to be really good’: Cormac McCarthy’s life in writing

Stella Maris, out in December and more explicitly a product of his years at SFI, focuses on a former mathematics prodigy, Alicia Western, who has lost her place in academia as well as her tenuous grasp on reality.

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Alicia is also a major character in The Passenger, the autumn’s other McCarthy novel, published next week. The first scene sees her holed up in a skeevy Chicago rooming house, where she trades insults with her most aggressive hallucination, who functions chiefly to debase Alicia in crude and offensive terms. “Jesus, he said. This place really sucks. Did you see what just crossed the floor? What, are we completely out of Zyklon B?”

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McCarthy is not a psychological writer in the traditional sense. His characters aren’t usually given elaborate back stories explaining motives for their present behaviour. They act and react. He describes with precise economy, as well as sometimes thunderous, witty or laconic oratory, what they do and say, the physical world they inhabit, the risks they face, and the often dire consequences of being alive.

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McCarthy is 89 and these two novels will likely be his last. Death is not a subject he has ever shied away from, in his fiction or conversation. Indeed, he has measured other writers by how seriously they address it. Both books offer evidence that he has spent time thinking about his own eventual end.

“I don’t think there is some way to prepare for death,” says Alicia in Stella Maris. “There’s no evolutionary advantage to being good at dying. Who would you leave it to? The thing you are dealing with – time – is immalleable. Except that the more you harbor it the less of it you have. The liquor of being is leaking out onto the ground. You need to hurry. But the haste itself is consuming what you wish to preserve. You can’t deal with what you’ve been sent to deal with.”

 Yep, that sound like the Cormac McCarthy I have read.

The Times Literary Supplement has a review of The Passenger here. 

sch 10/22/22

 

The Brisbane Times has Cormac McCarthy’s first novel in 16 years is dazzling and mysterious: 

After the apocalypse, an extended silence. It’s been 16 years since The Road, and discounting his curio screenplay, The Counselor, readers have been denied access to a single new word from Cormac McCarthy. Now, suddenly, spry at the age of 89, we have a surfeit, with The Passenger released this month followed by Stella Maris, its companion volume, in late November.

Reassuringly, time has not softened McCarthy. The Passenger is a sprawling, surreal affair, a book as strange as any he’s ever written, and reminiscent of the melancholy drift and God-haunted monologues of McCarthy’s earliest novels, published half a lifetime ago. While in precis a thriller, this isn’t No Old Country For Old Men. No gun is fired, no blade drawn from its sheath. This is more digression than headlong chase.

sch 10/23/22