@Hamishe22: Curious to see McCarthy rated so highly, I tried reading one of the two books on your list and thought it was plain and uninspired. To be fair, I did not finish the book so maybe it got better, or maybe you have to read them in tandem? ?
Stella Maris would be completely incomprehensible without having read
The Passenger. The latter can stand on its own though. These are my reviews for the two books in case you're curious why I loved them so much:
The Passenger:
There is no pleasure in the world, for me, greater than reading Cormac McCarthy. The way that he elevates the English language to the apex of its literary potential, the way that he uses extremely complex metaphors to convey thoughts and emotions that one finds simultaneously universal and novel, and how his prose is both biblical and colloquial, archaic and modern, poetic in a way completely unique to him. To continuously struggle with his bizarre vocabulary and specialized knowledge required to understanding him, but then when you do understand, the experience of the art and the discovery makes it worth it. And while I feel that The Passenger is not as dense and complicated and difficult as some of his other masterpieces (Blood Meridian for example), it still has this kind of passages enough to satisfy a McCarthy enthusiast.
The Passenger is definitely a McCarthy novel, in many ways. The prose, and the fact that an unsuspecting reader might be fooled into thinking that it's going to be a simple story within a genre framework for the writer to completely abandon the genre elements. But it's also completely different from his previous novels and provides a very new experience. I wouldn't call any of McCarthy's previous novels "psychological", but this one certainly is. It chiefly deals with grief, and personal guilt. At its heart it's the story of Bobby Western, a salvage diver who has a closer relationship with the ghosts of those he mourns rather than those who live, unable to form real relationships. These ghosts include his father, one of the inventors of the atomic bomb, and his sister, for whom he still harbors incestuous yet innocent feelings. Interspersed through the novel are short sections from the POV of the sister, as she deals with horrific hallucinations that simultaneously torment her and keep her company. We're accustomed to read McCarthy as he deals with epic, universal, and deeply philosophical subject matter, with characters like The Judge or Anton Chigurh, figures that seem to represent the devil or maybe evil gods of universe, poetic indictments of history and human nature. And while this book approaches that, including many contemplations on history and universe, it's still primarily a personal story, more about the characters' psyche in which the history and the universe are reflected. This is why this novel is so precious: not only we have a new McCarthy, we have an aspect of McCarthy we have not experienced before.
This novel is a stunning, breathtaking masterpiece. I know it has faced some negative criticism, but you have to approach it as it is rather than the expectation of what it should be. It's not really a whodunnit or a suspenseful thriller. It's not about a plot. It doesn't try to go anywhere. The long philosophical discussions and monologs are there because the novel is about a man stuck in his past, and you should focus on characterization and emotional richness rather than the plot.
Stella Maris:
Stella Maris is a companion piece to The Passenger, but while The Passenger might be McCarthy's most accessible novel, Stella Maris might be the least. The entire novel is a series of conversations between a patient and her therapist, and the conversations are incredibly dense and unwelcoming, dealing with topics like science, philosophy, and mathematics in very granular and difficult details and of course there is no plot connecting these disjointed discussions together. Not only that, the novel even retroactively makes The Passenger even more difficult, casting doubt and uncertainty about the events of that book, and creating far more questions than answers. However, if a reader is not deterred by any of this, I believe that Alicia Western is interesting enough of a character to stick with, with her incredibly intriguing thoughts and tragic personality, and I was very glad to get to know her better. This is character study at its purest and most effective form, and for those of us who love little more for characters, it's simply one of the best. Together with The Passenger, these two novels are an incredible swan song to cap off the career of one of the greatest literary giants of all time.