Book Review: Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy

By Simon Demetriou

I know I’m doing this all wrong, but I confess that Stella Maris is the first Cormac McCarthy novel I’ve read. (If that immediately disqualifies me from expressing a valid view on literature, then please accept my apologies for wasting your time with previous reviews, and go in peace.) This backwardness in getting started on an author whose esteem and mystique is the rival of any living English-language writer poses a question: does Stella Maris make me want to read the rest?

Well, not really.

Now, even an ignoramus like me has heard of the fact that McCarthy doesn’t ‘do’ women. Alicia Western, the protagonist of Stella Maris, is the first solo female lead he’s ever written, which is another reason why the book has garnered so much furore. Personally, I fall into the – sometimes oddly controversial – camp that women are just people too, so an author who claims they can’t write women is either saying that they don’t want to, or exposing a pretty basic flaw in their understanding of people as a whole. Reading this book, it feels like McCarthy might fall into both categories.

I’m dwelling so much on character, because Stella Maris purports to be the collected transcripts of Alicia’s therapy sessions having voluntarily checked herself into the psychiatric institution that gives the novel its name. So, really, there’s nothing much beyond her character on which to assess the novel. And her character is pretty ludicrous. She’s a maths genius with a cocktail of every conceivable psychological condition: synaesthesia, paranoid schizophrenia, suicidal ideation, probably autism, almost certainly anorexia. She claims to be a lesbian, but her therapist is dubious, alleging that she flirts with him (transference?), and she’s also ‘extremely attractive’ (positing the creepy macho fantasy of sexy lesbian conversion). Oh, and she’s in love with her brother who is currently lying in a coma in Europe.

There are a lot of sonorous sentences in Stella Maris, but ultimately none of them really convince the reader of Alicia’s feasibility as a person (let alone a woman), and it’s never particularly clear why she’s in therapy or what she wants to achieve. Her hallucinations, led by a flipper-handed little-person she names ‘the Thalidomide kid’, aren’t unwelcome to her. She has no qualms about her incestuous passions. Mostly, she seems to like toying with the therapist and showing off her knowledge (which, being a genius who can remember everything she’s ever read, the daughter of a physicist on the Manhattan Project, and a colleague or acquaintance of several of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, is understandably extensive). But what’s the point? I can’t say I’m sure.