Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy Review

It’s 1972 and 20 year old Alicia Western checks herself into Stella Maris, a mental hospital, where she suspects schizophrenia has taken hold of her as she has begun hallucinating visitations from an imaginary dwarfish figure called the Thalidomide Kid. The book follows a series of sessions between her and her doctor Michael Cohen.

So this is the second and final book in the story that began, and ostensibly ended, in The Passenger, because Stella Maris is a completely unnecessary addition to what should have only been a standalone novel.

I expected it to contribute at least something to the previous book - unearth a layer of understanding or enlighten us on as aspect of the story - but, no, Stella Maris literally adds nothing to The Passenger, unless you wanted more pointless dialogue on maths, physics and the prominent figures in those fields.

The book is 100% dialogue between Alicia and the doc, following McCarthy’s style of no punctuation, quotation marks or “he/she said”, though, given that it’s just the two characters, you can easily follow who’s speaking without those cues (Alicia is by far the chattier of the two).

All the novel does is cover the same ground that was sufficiently covered in The Passenger: Alicia being a crazy genius in love with her older brother Bobby, Bobby’s European escapades and finding their gran’s secret treasure, their dad’s involvement in the Manhattan Project, and that Alicia’s completely batty but also thoroughly learned in maths and physics.

Somebody reading this without realising it’s the second half of a larger story would probably get the same out of someone who read the series in order: that is, wondering what the hell the point of all this waffling nonsense is!

I found the short discussions on maths and physics in The Passenger quite tedious - to read nearly 200 pages of the same but in greater detail was completely boring. McCarthy writes dialogue well but nothing about this book is worth reading in the slightest. If you’ve read The Passenger, reading Stella Maris is entirely superfluous - for completists only, and even then it likely won’t be an enjoyable experience.