When I picked up “The Passenger” by Cormac McCarthy I barely put it down until I finished. I had the same experience with “Stella Maris,” an addendum, or coda, to “The Passenger” but published 6 weeks later.
It is all a mysterious tale of love, loss, guilt, grief, genius, insanity, intrigue, crime and punishment, with roots in Knoxville, Oak Ridge, New Orleans…and Hiroshima. McCarthy’s skill with language is there undiminished—poetry in flow as he leads the reader from Oak Ridge labs to the French Quarter to European automobile race courses and John Kennedy’s assassination and to the bottom of both the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Tahoe—all told through dialogue among consummately interesting characters throughout these books that are almost entirely dialogue. “Stella Maris” is entirely dialog between the patient and her therapist. The dialogue turns the pages without bogging the reader down in details of number theory or quantum mechanics or who shot Jack. Scores of the world’s historic theoretic mathematicians and physicists become named reference points in the books, prominently including Oppenheimer.
I cannot say else without spoiling it for those yet to read it but McCarthy offers it as a message to those who survive him, a well-turned job of showing us the door. He died less than 8 months after the publication date.
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If you would like to see my collection of Carolina Lowcountry memories—"Magnolia Elegy: Place In the Edisto Fork," you can view the book trailer here, and see the book page here on the publisher's website. The book is also available from Amazon, B&N, and your independent local bookseller.
