Stella Maris
NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The second volume of The Passenger series, from The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • An intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to understand her own existence. "The richest and strongest work of McCarthy’s career…An achievement greater than Blood Meridian…or…The Road.” —The Atlantic 1972, BLACK RIVER FALLS, WISCONSIN: Alicia Western, twenty years old, with forty thousand dollars in a plastic bag, admits herself to the hospital. A doctoral candidate in mathematics at the University of Chicago, Alicia has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and she does not want to talk about her brother, Bobby. Instead, she contemplates the nature of madness, the human insistence on one common experience of the world; she recalls a childhood where, by the age of seven, her own grandmother feared for her; she surveys the intersection of physics and philosophy; and she introduces her cohorts, her chimeras, the hallucinations that only she can see. All the while, she grieves for Bobby, not quite dead, not quite hers. Told entirely through the transcripts of Alicia’s psychiatric sessions, Stella Maris is a searching, rigorous, intellectually challenging coda to The Passenger, a philosophical inquiry that questions our notions of God, truth, and existence.
Stats for nerds
13recommend
20mentions
18people
2023–2026years
65% recommend35% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- My first introduction was The Passenger, which I greatly enjoyed. Actually it was probably some HN comment that finally got me to buy it. Obviously I followed it up with Stella Maris and his article The Kekule Problem, also great.
Then I started Blood Meridian and DNF’d it, which I almost never do. I’m sure it pays off etc. and maybe I’ll come back to it eventually, but I just didn’t see the point and decided it wasn’t for me at the time. It’s obviously entirely awful in the wanton cruelty and violence, but more importantly I found it very tedious as a non-native speaker. I respect McCarthy’s style and the details were clearly well-researched, so it’s totally on me, but between the extremely specific vocabulary and the confusing paragraphs that require a good amount of concentration and thought, the difficulty wasn’t worth it for me. I’m sure I’m doing the book injustice and maybe some interesting character or great revelation or deep connection or romantic sensibility was just waiting in the next chapter, but you know…
I do have All The Pretty Horses lying around, might actually get to it soon.
Anyway, unless maybe you’re already super into the setting, I would probably suggest not starting with Blood Meridian.
- I don't think it diminishes him.
"Stella Maris" is a great novel that could only be written by someone who was very knowledgeable about math. As far as art that engages deeply with math and science, I don't know of anything comparable. Most artists would focus only on the human drama of discovery, without being able to engage with the subject matter.
However, I would consider "mastery" of a math textbook to be you have worked through almost all the chapters, can do a reasonable chunk of the exercises, and could TA the course without too much trouble.
While I don't know for sure, I doubt McCarthy achieved that level of understanding for all the yellow books he owned. I think buying a math textbook on an interesting topic and then not making it very far is a very common and human experience.
- The Road was the first of his books I read. I read his last two books The Passenger and Stella Maris shortly after he passed. Both contained interesting thoughts on philosophy, science, mathematics. Of the two, I think Stella Maris was better - it's kind of a deep dive into genius and the madness that often accompanies it.
Agree on Steinbeck. Less cruel and more hopeful. My favorite American author. It would have been very interesting to be a fly on the wall in a discussion between an aged Steinbeck and a young McCarthy - one of those questions where if you could have two authors talk to each other over a beer and sit in on the conversation.
- Agree that “Stella Maris” is amazing for this deep engagement with art. Perhaps in a similar vein I do think there are a couple of other books that do this . One is Anathem by Neal Stephenson, which is similar in that foundations of math makes an appearance. The other is “The Weyl Conjectures” by Karen Olson, which captures what it’s like to really do mathematics. Highly recommend both.
- "The Passenger" and "Stella Maris" by Cormac McCarthy are fantastic. In general, I enjoy McCarthy's work because I believe he manages to present interesting ideas drawn from philosophy and religion, and if you read between the lines of his work, there is a fairly elaborate cosmology behind them. With these final works, he manages to combine this tendency with his decades of residence at the Santa Fe Institute and work with researchers in complexity science, mathematics, physics, etc. Moreover, he does so without the more trite ways non-scientists often draw upon science (for instance, just crudely using quantum mechanics as a stand-in for the supernatural). I think you could probably write a thesis on the way he integrated advances in complexity science and mathematics/physics with philosophy/religion/mythology with a close reading of his work. I mention this first and with particular emphasis because I believe it is chronically under-discussed and deserves a systematic study by someone who understands philosophy and modern physics and complexity science much better than I do. There is a hauntingly dark and beautiful cosmology behind this work, in a way even darker than his earlier works like "Blood Meridian."
I can also see the works of Arthur Schopenhauer being of great interest to many HN readers. His reconciliation of Western philosophy (especially Kant and British Empiricists) with Buddhism and Hinduism is unique and for me the most interesting overall system. His work is entirely worth reading for the quality of writing alone. For me, his works evoke the experience of mathematical beauty. I would recommend gaining a basic understanding of Kant, Buddhism, Hinduism, and then reading his work "Essays and Aphorisms," followed by "The World as Will and Idea."
"Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes" by Jacques Ellul is the book I have read that best explains the human experience in the modern media environment. Like "The World as Will and Representation," it also forms a sort of complete system, which can be read as an organic whole as well as with self-referential parts. I believe most of the "alienation" we experience from technology, which is often blamed on the internet, is really a much older and broader phenomenon, which Ellul attributes to the development of the radio, "technique," and broader phenomenological experience within 20th-century totalitarian societies.
"Simulacra and Simulation" is another that I have enjoyed. It is the work I have read that, in my opinion, best provides a model for living in a post-modern, post-industrial society, and my intuition is that it will also prove authentic in the age of artificial intelligence.
- I'm not aware of any, but maybe somebody else is. A more general question is are there any other DFW-ish math-ish writings to be found? Against The Day (Pynchon) is not really math-ish, but it does have a good bit of math (more than GR at least), and a DFW fan would probably like it. Stella Maris (McCarthy) is perhaps neither DFW-ish nor math-ish, but it is Serious Fiction centered on a mathematician and is probably the best work of fiction to feature Alexander Grothendieck. I have heard that Solenoid (Cartarescu) has some math in it, though I fear it's still sitting on my shelf. Every Arc Bends Its Radian (due in a couple months from Sergio De La Pava) has a math-ish title but I doubt it will actually contain much math.
Michael Harris -- a mathematician who wrote a review of the DFW Infinity book -- has a book called "Mathematics Without Apologies", which I liked, though it's non-fiction. There is also "Birth of a Theorem" by Fields medalist Cedric Villani which is an interesting read -- not fiction, but it is experimental in many respects and I would say worth a read.
