Book Review: Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

 

 Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

190 pages, Hardcover

December, 2022 by Knopf

A longer more fully thought-out NOPE than my original NOPE...

“Talking is just recording what you’re thinking. It’s not the thing itself. When I’m talking to you some separate part of my mind is composing what I’m about to say. But it’s not yet in the form of words. So what is it in the form of? There’s certainly no sense of some homunculus whispering to us the words we’re about to say. Aside from raising the spectre of an infinite regress—as in who is whispering to the whisperer—it raises the question of a language of thought. Part of the general puzzle of how we get from the mind to the world. A hundred billion synaptic events clicking away in the dark like blind ladies.”

A benefit of being an author whom most consider one of the greatest alive is getting to say “fuck it,” with complete abandon. In Stephen King, it ends up with books like Duma Key or Lisey’s Story that as much as love King you couldn’t pay me to finish. The success at the box office for Ari Aster recently resulted in Beau is Afraid a movie that is either a 3-hour masterpiece or an arthouse wank fest depending on who you ask.

I can’t imagine being an editor on a Cormac McCarthy book as he has zero fucks to give for grammar, but that is nothing new. For decades he has shrugged off quotation marks and even periods. I admit that is the one that kills me sometimes. I don’t know how many times I tell my special needs students if you like it put a period on it. I think if I said that to Uncle Cormac he would just point silently at his Pulitzer Prize. Or just Fuck off.

Fair.

Stella Mars is a companion book to The Passenger, a more proper novel that I reviewed in February. I admit much of the story has escaped my brain. When a co-worker asked me what it was about I glibly said “Oppenheimer’s bastard son is a deep sea diver, he takes this gig that was more interesting than all the soul searching that happens in the second half.” The thing was I was entirely sure that was accurate as my memory of the book is fuzzy.

The best thing about The Passenger was the pages when the dialogue took over. Bobby would have a back and forth, there would funny phrases and some gem about the destructive nature of our species would sneak in and give me the feeling I was peeking at a universal truth.

Stella Mars was all that. It was an entire book about a character and his doctor at a psychiatric hospital. 181 pages of dialogue, no speech tags, no quotation marks. No action, no description. It was just like my favorite moments in The Passenger but the whole book. The first 30 pages I was totally in, but it became like eating nothing but peanut butter and chocolate for a week straight.

That said there were still gems…

If you had to say something definitive about the world in a single sentence what would that sentence be?
It would be this: the world has created no living thing that it does not intend to destroy.

Or…

Music is made out of nothing but some fairly simple rules . . . The notes themselves amount to almost nothing. But why some particular arrangement of these notes should have such a profound effect on our emotions is a mystery beyond even the hope of comprehension.

So you see this is a two-star book for me with 5 stars moments. Much like Beauty or the new Ari Aster movie Stella Mars is an experience in the eye of the beholder. These eyes beheld the short book in small bursts over two weeks, and still, they wandered. I started other books, lost interest, and ultimately didn’t care. Bummer. He is still one of the GOATs.