Quantum Woo Woo, but Maybe It's Smart | The Passenger and Stella Maris | Book Review

The Passenger and Stella Maris are jointly the final novels written by the late author, Cormac McCarthy. I acquired first editions when they were first released, on the suggestion of a booktuber, because he thought that this pair would be the last of McCarthy's life. It turned out that he was right.

It has taken me so long to read these two books because I cannot claim to be a significant fan of his work. I have read Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, and The Road—and I have mixed feelings about all of them. I think No Country is one of my favorite films of all time, but that is primarily because it removes one of my major problems with the author: his prose.

In my Blood Meridian review, I broke down his use of polysyndetons and my frustrations with them. They are emblematic of his style. In either my review of the former or my review of No Country, I criticized his lack of quotation marks, as well. I thought that they gave the stories a dreamy atmosphere, which I felt was incompatible with his kind of story. That actually ended up inspiring me to drop the quotation marks for one of my upcoming novels, A Hollow State of Sleep, for reasons obvious in the title.

All of this is to say, my relationship to this author is rather complicated. I don't consider him a master. I thought Blood Meridian was boring, and I didn't like the prosework. But I'm still drawn back to him for some reason. And to be fair to him, do I consider any writer a master? Lionel Shriver is probably my highest rated author, though I've only read two of her books.

Now, I have completed The Passenger and Stella Maris, and my experience with them is as strange as you can imagine. Like I said with the book House of Leaves, I did not enjoy reading it, not all that much, but I did enjoy having read them. The process of reflection afterward was interesting and highlights just how thematic both books are. The Passenger has a gossamer for a plot, and Stella Maris is best described as a Socratic dialogue. Throughout each of the books, they explore a range of topics, including philosophy, the meaning of life, war, and especially quantum physics.

The Passenger

The Passenger starts out in a very misleading way, and I would say, is described in a very misleading way. Bobby Western is part of a diving crew, where they find a plane that has been submerged in the deep. And in their search, they find that there are missing things, including the flight bag, the data box, and a tenth passenger. Shortly after the search, Bobby encounters two unexplained agents who are asking him questions about the plane.

But the story is not really about the missing passenger. In fact, I would argue that this misdirection is kind of the point. Instead, the book is incredibly reflective, in its own right. Much of the pages are of dialogue. Bobby sits down and talks about life and physics and more with a range of characters, including a transwoman, a conspiracy theorist PI, and his buddies who dive with him. The story does not have much of a plot to bind the events together, except in bare ways that become thematically important by the end.

Atmosphere

I mentioned before that I did not think that removing quotations was suitable for the kind of stories that McCarthy tells. In particular, I was talking about Blood Meridian and No Country. In this book, I can finally say that I stand corrected. For this book. I think this book is complimented by this stylistic choice. Much of the novel reads like you're drifting through life in a haze. The scattered threads of the plot even contribute to this. And once the novel is finished, I think the feeling lands the hardest. I have seen multiple interpretations of how the story is to be read, and this haziness is also part of the point.

Prose

I don't know if this is a quality of this book specifically, or if my attitude has simply changed, but his use of polysyndetons were not annoying to me. It's still not my preference, but I did not think they got in the way this time. Maybe it's because much of this is actually dialogue.

Characters

McCarthy's characters are usually not something that stand out to me. Blood Meridian comes to mind (there is an over 100 page stretch where the protagonist is not even mentioned!). And as intentional as that choice was, it seems equally intentional that his characters stand out in this one. Bobby Western is the protagonist, somebody who is tortured by his attraction to his long dead sister. He lives alone. He has connections to various people, and he talks with them around town, but his isolation seems to be a defining feature.

Alicia Western is the secondary perspective character in this book. She is featured in the beginning of most of the chapters, where she is hallucinating someone called the Thalidomide Kid, as well as other members of his minstrel show. These sections are largely incomprehensible, which is only validated by Alicia's own claims in this book and in the second novel. That said, I do think they serve an important thematic point, of which is also tied to Alicia's own character, which is highlighted in Stella Maris. She is not particularly developed in this book, though I think it provides some foundational context for the following book.

The rest of the characters, we experience in vignettes throughout the book through dialogue, whether it is Oiler and his experiences in Vietnam, Debussy and the experience of transitioning, or Kline the PI sharing his theories of how JFK was shot. They all serve different purposes, and help bring together a wide range of topics for discussion within the novel.

Themes

The themes of this book are quite scattered at first look. I mean, they are scattered, in fact. Initially, I was fairly critical of the book, if only because I thought it was all over the place. The book seemed to want to cover all of the territory all at once. Was there a single topic not covered in this novel? When you add in the fact that the novel seems to have little to no plot, this was a difficult read, if you are one to dwell on topics and read carefully.

Once I finished the novel, things seemed to click for me. As I described before, the plot was a gossamer, and it dissolves before you as you realize something about Bobby. (At this point, I'm just going to start spoiling the story.)

The story starts with the mystery of the Passenger and the other missing items on the plane. Bobby is later questioned by unknown agents. One of his fellow divers ends up dying mysteriously. After visiting his grandmother's house, he learns that his father's physics notes were stolen. He starts to hide from the authorities. Eventually, his bank is locked down, and his car is impounded. His PI encourages him to flee from New Orleans entirely. All along, he feels that he is being followed. But you learn crucial facts along the way, especially at the end. His PI shares his thoughts on the JFK assassination, namely that there was a conspiracy, and also . . . Western meets the Kid from Alicia's hallucinations. This last point is the biggest one to note.

I know that there are different interpretations of the scene between Western and the Kid, with corresponding implications. Carroll Wainwright interpreted this as to say that McCarthy was finally throwing back the veil. He was revealing that supernatural events actually do occur. This has been a theme in many of his novels, without a clear answer, and he thought that it was answered here. Now, I never really thought that the Judge was ambiguous as a supernatural entity. But even then, there is the question: how did Bobby encounter one of Alicia's hallucinations? Carroll mentioned that John Wheeler was referenced, or at least his idea of a participatory universe. The basic idea is that reality is only information, and it requires an observer to bring reality into existence. This is an idea that is sometimes floated in quantum mechanics, with some versions hoping to revive idealism, where the whole of reality is a mind. This is how Carroll justifies his claim that the supernatural exists in this book. I don't think this is as clear as he thinks, but it is worth mentioning, before we move on to the next book.

My interpretation was different, with almost the exact opposite implications. We know that Alicia described her hallucinations to Bobby, so I thought this was Bobby beginning to hallucinate (and, in a way, connect with his sister). I thought this was the result of his own schizophrenia, which we know is genetic. This also had implications for the plot. Bobby is a paranoid schizophrenic. He thinks he is being chased. Even when he is alone on the oil drill, he feels that someone is there. And then his PI, who has conspiracy theories about JFK's assassination, convinces him that he should run because the feds are after him. All of this together indicates that this chase was a fabrication of Western's own mind. His bank account being locked down, his car being impounded, his father's papers being stolen, the missing passenger—all of these points were simply strung together into a narrative despite being unrelated events. The whole plot that the readers were following was imagined. It kind of just . . . dissolves. Western's life dissolves. Like he died.

End

A consistent trend with McCarthy is that his books do not follow the normal structure. His plot often phases out (The Road), or falls on its face (No Country For Old Men), though it is always deliberate. The Passenger is no exception. It's not satisfying in any conventional sense, but I still come away intrigued and thinking about the story. This is one thing I envy about McCarthy.

Stella Maris

Alicia Western is the main character of the companion book, Stella Maris. But as I mentioned, this book almost entirely takes the form of dialogue. Other than the opening portion, you learn that this is simply the transcript of seven conversations that she had with a psychiatrist, after showing up at the mental institution the novel is named after.

There is not much plot, or really a story at all. In a way, it is a socratic dialogue similar to what Plato would write, like in The Republic. The book covers a wide range of topics, including the existence of God, the nature of mathematics, physics, the meaning of life, schizophrenia, and more. Much like the previous novel, it ultimately covers a lot of ground, thematically. But in this case, it is purely in the context of these dialogues. Alicia is a brilliant mathematician, and in this book, we learn that she has essentially given up on the project, having realized that it is pointless or meaningless, or some combination of the two. We also learn that what seemed to have driven her to this institution is the fact that her brother is currently comatose after a racecar crash. The doctors have asked her to unplug him, and she fled instead.

What we know from the passenger is that she killed herself shortly after this novel, and we also learn that her brother, of course, wakes up from the coma. The context is quite disturbing.

Alicia

Alicia is purported to have genius level intelligence. This is to such an extent that she can mess with the intelligence testing. She tested at about 100, but only because she sarcastically said that this was the score people were supposed to get. (As an aside, there was also a remark where she said the tests were racist, because black people don't score as high, and a black person with technical genius on an instrument won't have that captured. This was one of the usual dumb asides that stood out to me. IQ scores predict achievement as well for each race as the other, and while IQ actually does predict musical aptitude, it is also not the only predictor. And IQ's failure to predict something is not an argument against it, as IQ is a measure of intelligence, not one's ability to keep a rhythm or anything else. But this is just a nitpick.)

In the story, as some reviewers have described, we see Alicia run circles around the psychiatrist, and this is mainly because of the knowledge that she has over him. Much of the discussion is about math, and especially the various mathematicians that she knows (all of whom are actual historical figures).

One thing in particular that I want to focus on is how she described her thesis. Basically, she ended up undermining its own foundations as she drew out the logical consequences. This provides insight into her psychology, as she loves mathematics, and she has ended up giving it up. It actually reminded me of one of the short stories in Ted Chiang's collection, Story of Your Life, where a woman gives up on life after finding that mathematics was inconsistent with itself. The fact that we know that Alicia kills herself shortly after this, adds another layer.

Theme I

From here, I want to move on to the themes, which heavily overlap with Alicia's character and the first book.

First, I want to cover Carroll Wainwright's interpretation, which carries over from what I discussed when looking at The Passenger. He points out that Alicia mentions the Archatron, which is a term that McCarthy invented and has mentioned in a prior novel, one of the books in the border trilogy. It comes up in a part where Alicia mentions having a vision/dream about seeing something beyond a door that she was not supposed to see. This was the Archatron. Wainwright's interpretation of the passage is that this Archatron is a gnostic deity, namely the creator deity that is lower than the supreme one. As before, this seems to further confirm the claim that supernaturalism exists, especially given Alicia's suggestion that the Kid and the other "hallucinations" were sent to her by the Archatron. She actually speaks of George Berkley and his idealism, where all of reality is just mind substance. This ties neatly back to the notion of the participatory universe and quantum mechanics. The idea that observation is required for existence is/was an attempt to revive idealism, by claiming that the whole universe is the mind of God. It is in this metaphysical context that the Kid and the Archatron exist.

As before, I don't agree, entirely. To my mind, this book adds another level of ambiguity to the two books that I think is deliberate.

Theme II

A lot of discussion goes into the topic of mathematical platonism, the idea that math is something that exists on a separate abstract plane than material reality. The significance of this goes beyond the mere metaphysical question, because of Alicia's character. For her, this is like asking whether there is a reality at all. And she ended up giving up on mathematics in the lead up to these conversations. My own read on this is that this is tied to her experiences of hallucination. The general idea is that she is visited by these manifestations, and the determination of their reality is not easily parsed. Crucially, this is similar to the question of whether mathematics exists. While most people would follow the usual line and say that their hallucinations must not be real, an especially intellectually-gifted person would stop and ponder their existence; they would ponder the justification for their existence. Throughout all of this, only one of these questions—the existence of a hallucination and the existence of mathematical objects—is actually considered philosophically interesting.

I remember when I first started thinking about the deeper philosophical questions, I connected hallucinations to the question of sense data accuracy. In philosophy, there is the question of how we know that our sense data is accurate in the first place. There are the famous thought experiments put forward by Descartes and others, asking how we know it is not simply an evil demon tricking us, or that we are simply a brain in a vat. Most are not able to answer this. Perhaps no one is. We simply cannot step outside our sensory-perceptive faculty to determine that they are accurate in any way. But while certainty in this global understanding is taken for granted as impossible, we simultaneously say that we can determine whether our sense-percepts are accurate on a more local level. In other words, we casually accept that hallucinations are possible. I asked myself what the difference was. How could we be sure that a single hallucination was not accurate, while not knowing one way or another about our sense-perception, globally? The question was about justification.

My answer came down to pointing out that "hallucinations" are not consistent with what could be considered normal percepts. A normal percept was predictable across the five senses. It was universal across subjects. A hallucination might be something that is seen but not felt; it might be something heard but not seen; it might be hazy; and most of all, it was not something simply visible through one person's eyes. I thought you could identify a hallucination by showing that it deviated in some way. Indeed, consensus was an aspect of this.

This brings me back to the hallucinations in Alicia's experience. Contrary to the norm, her hallucinations were clairvoyant. They were not hazy. This, taken with the understanding that her schizophrenia was atypical and even doubted by some psychologists, asks uncomfortable questions about the veracity of what she was seeing. Perhaps she is atypical, or maybe she actually does see something in reality that others don't. Either way, Alicia is the type of person to be held up by the question of whether the Kid actually exists or not. While she might just be an atypical schizophrenic, from her perspective it is not so clear. And in the minds of others, the mere fact that she deviates from the consensus is evidence to call her crazy. Such is the torment of being too smart.

Theme III

Further, the discussions about quantum mechanics, particularly the interpretations related to the participatory universe, can be used to supplement this. Simplifying to the extreme, the reality that we understand can only exist in interaction with other things. A thing cannot exist on its own. This is an interpretation relevant to the quantum level, but perhaps McCarthy is connecting it to perception, itself, where something like the Kid can only exist in interaction with Alicia (or Western). Hallucinations in general have this kind of quality. I'll admit this part seems to be more of a stretch, even if it is McCarthy's stretch, especially given how prone quantum mechanics is to interpretive abuse.

But the real underlying issue is still there: What I'm suggesting is deliberate uncertainty. The reality of the Kid is not really answered in a clear way, and this is the case for Alicia as well, even if she has some incentive to believe that the hallucinations are real. This can be compared to the question of mathematical platonism. For her, the questions are metaphysically and epistemologically similar, and the uncertainty is the point.

I've almost certainly run right out into the deep end with my theorizing, here. But that happens when you try to connect a book to your own life or train of thoughts.

When you look back onto The Passenger, having read this book, you find yourself in a similar problem as Alicia. Did Western actually meet the Kid, or was he schizophrenic as well? The uncertainty is the point. Indeed, our desire for an answer is the point.

The Ending

On a final note, the two books taken together place the reader in a kind of dual reality, where either sibling thinks that the other is dead, and shows their resulting grief. You could even question further and suggest that The Passenger is all just a fever dream from Western while he is in a coma. I don't think I would go that far, but it's a thought.

There is much more that could be discussed, but I think I will break things off here. Given the structure of the book, there is no real ending, save for Alicia's desire to be comforted in some capacity.

Conclusion

Overall, both of these books were thought-provoking throughout. The characters, too, were some of McCarthy's most well-written to date (among what I've read). The Passenger, especially, was a bit overstuffed, but you can find ways to connect the pieces thematically, throughout. I think I will give The Passenger a 7/10. I will give Stella Maris a 7/10.

Video: https://youtu.be/CWx64OLsaZE

McCarthy's Essay: https://nautil.us/the-kekul-problem-236574

Carroll Wainwright with Jason Fuhrman: https://youtu.be/NH_FPdVSoYA?si=HiVEL9SOx7U2rGYe

Carroll Wainwright’s Second Video: https://youtu.be/BLJnT1Xbf1g?si=8cS3yJlrb7z

Blood Meridian Review: https://leehuntswriting.blogspot.com/2022/04/blood-meridian-book-review.html