Some books arrive predusted with the shimmer of literary myth. Stella Maris is one of them: Cormac McCarthy’s 12th – and likely final – novel, a tale concocted at the Santa Fe Institute, “a thinktank for maverick brainiacs” where the 89-year-old author spends his days discoursing with quantum physicists and clacking away on his portable typewriter, marinating in genius.
For a writer who spurns the conventions of punctuation, Stella Maris feels a lot like a full stop, a parting pronouncement on the whole sordid human experiment. It’s the second McCarthy novel to be published this year – a companion volume to The Passenger, released in late October. After 16 years of literary silence, McCarthy has produced a drought-busting, brain-vexing double act: first, a nihilistic vaudeville; now, its austere twin.
