Book Review: ‘Stella Maris,’ by Cormac McCarthy

“Stella Maris” is, by comparison, a small and frequently elegiac novel. It’s best read while you are still buzzing from the previous book. Its themes are dark ones, and yet it brings you home, like the piano coda at the end of “Layla.”

A lot of what Alicia wants to talk about is mathematics; numbers filled her up, only to scour her out. She’s largely abandoned the practice. She pushed equations until they led into chasms instead of bridges; they bent into witchcraft. McCarthy’s own late-life interest in physics is everywhere apparent. Here’s Alicia:

Verbal intelligence will only take you so far. There is a wall there, and if you dont understand numbers you wont even see the wall. People from the other side will seem odd to you. And you will never understand the latitude which they extend to you. They will be cordial — or not — depending on their nature.

No one in the real world talks the way Alicia does — she’s seeing with her third eye, flexing her middle finger at the world, rocking her family’s thundersome legacy — but they might if they could. She lays down the cataclysmic one-liners.

Every benevolence is suspect.

There’s a lot of bad news out there and some of it is coming to your house.

Sites that have been host to extraordinary suffering will eventually be either burned to the ground or turned into temples.

Your life is set upon you like a dog.

What Satan had for sale in the garden was knowledge.

McCarthy is an inveterate ham, so all this is cut with humor. Alicia is touchy about coming from Wartburg, Tenn., which is about an hour outside Knoxville. She describes a deranged uncle who has taken to defecating in hard-to-reach places, like inside the ceiling lamp in the kitchen.

Alicia toys with her shrink. It’s as if she’s breathing on a car window and drawing flowers and skulls in the condensation. Alicia also happens to be suicidal. She’s no longer at a safe distance from her own epistemological nihilism. If she had an “off” switch she would have flicked it.

McCarthy being McCarthy, Alicia has done the hard thinking about suicide. One of this book’s bravura passages is her extended analysis of how miserable it would be to try to kill yourself by drowning. The most moving moments in “Stella Maris” braid her feelings for her brother, which go through her like a spear, with a sense of intellectual futility.

Reading “Stella Maris” after “The Passenger” is like trying to hang onto a dream you’ve been having. It’s an uncanny, unsettling dream, tuned into the static of the universe. In “The Road” (2006), McCarthy put it this way: “Nobody wants to be here and nobody wants to leave.”

STELLA MARIS | By Cormac McCarthy | 190 pp. | Alfred A. Knopf | $26