Inside the violent, visceral world of Cormac McCarthy, one of America’s greatest writers

2022 will be etched in literary history for the return of Cormac McCarthy, who published two interconnected novels this year, after a 16-year-long hiatus: The Passenger (October 25) and  Stella Maris (December 6), published by Pan Macmillan India. The last novel by 89-year-old McCarthy, considered to be one of the most significant American writers, was the post-apocalyptic novel The Road, which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, and has acquired the status of a cult classic in the last decade and a half.

The Passenger and Stella Maris are spun around existential themes and big ideas like morality and science. They follow the story of two siblings, Bobby and Alicia Western, who are tormented by the ghosts of their physicist father, inventor of the atom bomb that “melted glass and flesh in Hiroshima.” In The Passenger — which opens on a frigid night at Mississippi’s Pass Christian in 1980 and traverses the 19^th century American South — salvage diver Bobby Western becomes a “collateral witness” to machinations that put him in harm’s way.  McCarthy, as ever, is interested in the “madness called the human consciousness”.

The arcs of grief and longing

Stella Maris, the companion novel to The Passenger, is soaked in grief and longing; the deep bond between the siblings is imbued with a hint of incest. Alicia, the ‘love and ruin’ of Bobby’s soul, is a math prodigy, but her intellect frightens people; her hallucinations take the form of characters, finding their own chambers of distinct voices. It takes the action to the prelude of The Passenger. It’s 1972. Twenty-year-old Alicia, a doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and admits herself in a psychiatric facility in order to understand her own existence.

While The Passenger is told through the voice of an omniscient narrator, Stella Maris — a philosophical inquiry into the notions of truth and divinity — unfolds through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions. The two novels are not as dark as McCarthy’s previous 10 works of fiction, including The Road’s predecessor, No Country For Old Men. (Its antagonist, Anton Chigurh, was played to ominous perfection by Javier Bardem in Coen brothers’ film adaptation, which brings alive a lawless land, plagued by violence and dread). However, their landscapes are as grim.

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Granted, they are not gory: no human is brutalised in the manner Chigurh — a psychopathic killer whose signature weapon is a captive bolt stunner, with which he kills his victims and also shoots out door locks — does in No Country For Old Men. But the texture of these novels is characteristically dark and eerie, which becomes evident in the opening pages itself.

No surprises there. If it’s not dark and solemn, it’s not McCarthy, a writer with an ontological interest in creating sombre characters and barren, harsh and unforgiving terrains; a writer, who is also a prophet of prophecy, invested in the impermanence of everything. “Nothing’s forever,” Alicia tells his benevolent tormentor, Kid, in the opening chapter of The Passenger. Life and death form the bedrock of McCarthy’s fiction. “If it doesn’t concern life and death… It’s not interesting,” McCarthy, who is notoriously private and hardly gives interviews, told David Kushner in an interview for the Rolling Stone.

McCarthy’s critics have often targeted him for his obsessions with male characters. In Stella Maris, he breaks away from that practice. “I was planning on writing about a woman for 50 years,” McCarthy told the Wall Street Journal in a 2009 interview. “I will never be competent enough to do so, but at some point you have to try.” Stella Maris shows that his reluctance was unfounded.

The road to literary stardom  

Born in Providence, Rhode Island, McCarthy grew up in a big sprawling house in Knoxville, Tennessee. His father, Charles Joseph McCarthy, was a prominent lawyer. In 1976, he moved to El Paso, Texas, on the US-Mexico border. Though he was raised in comfortable surroundings, he abstained from writing about domestic life. McCarthy spent most of his adult life in near-poverty, and it is believed that there were times when he could not even afford toothpaste. An inward person, he shunned publicity and refused speaking engagements after he published his first novel, The Orchard Keeper — “about nature and man, and about the nature of man” — in 1965.

Most of McCarthy’s early novels are set in the American south and the southwest. In these tales depicting violence and human depravity, he explores human being’s capacity for good and evil. Saturated with graphic killings, they have often been termed as nihilistic and gnostic.

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While his first book was noticed and got favourable reviews, it was not until 1985 that McCarthy came to enjoy a reasonable standing as a novelist. In that year, he published Blood Meridian, an epic novel steeped in the depredations unleashed in the wake of America’s westward expansion. Based on historical events that took place on the Texas-Mexico border in the 1850s, Blood Meridian traces the journey of Kid, a 14-year-old Tennessean, who is a witness to the brutal murder of Indians, whose scalps sell in the market like hot cakes.

Blood Meridian subverted the conventions of the Western novel, and the mythology of the Wild West; it is considered to be McCarthy’s masterpiece. However, it was the success of the film adaptation of No Country for Old Men (2007) that drastically changed things for McCarthy. The film won Academy awards in four categories: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Subsequently, the novelist, playwright and screenwriter became the cause célèbre at American universities, where his novels came to be taught. This was followed by the adaptation of The Road, which cemented his reputation as “an uncompromising examiner of the depths of human depravity, the nature of evil, and the bonds that endure between men.”

 ‘Death-dealing, life-giving’ prose

For nearly five decades, McCarthy has been writing in the old narrative register, a prose style that is invariably associated with modernists like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. He has come to be viewed as the most resolutely individual of contemporary American writers; his prose style marked with little regard for punctuation and apostrophes, imagery, and thematic preoccupations are distinctively McCarthyesque.

It has been 16 years since McCarthy wrote The Road, but the searing novel, which chronicles the struggle of a father and son to survive the unspecified cataclysm, remains fresh in the readers’ imagination even today. His novels are expansive and timeless. They plumb the depths of the human mind and, in turn, invite us to plumb their depths — again and again. His two recent novels do the same.

Unlike many modernists, McCarthy steers clear of internality — we are rarely privy to the internal/ emotional lives of his characters, which are often in conflict with society, making choices based on their instincts rather than thought.

Canadian-American writer Saul Bellow had praised McCarthy for his “absolutely overpowering use of language, his life-giving and death-dealing sentences”. In his novels, and in his real life, McCarthy has remained a stern pessimist who would have us believe that we are all doomed, but his story offers us hope.