Burning Man
by Tess Crain
This essay appears in Issue 3 of the Mars Review of Books. Visit the MRB store here.
Teenager
by Bud Smith
Vintage, 400 pp., $12.29
Everything Is Totally Fine
by Zac Smith
Muumuu House, 152 pp., $16.00
Savage Spear of the Unicorn
by Delicious Tacos
Independently Published, 204 pp., $14.00
The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 400 pp., $25.53
Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy
Knopf, 208 pp., $19.99
Fire is typically anathema to books. Yet five new works by four male authors—Zac Smith’s Everything Is Totally Fine (Muumuu House, 2022), Delicious Tacos’ Savage Spear of the Unicorn (Independently published, 2020), Bud Smith’s Teenager (Vintage Books, 2022), and Cormac McCarthy’s The Passenger and Stella Maris (both Knopf, 2022)—make a case for at least the symbolic combination of literary fiction and conflagration.
Midway through The Passenger, a friend tells the protagonist, “any number of . . . books were penned in lieu of burning down the world—which was their author’s true desire.” You need look no further than Zac Smith’s story “I Am Going to Burn Down the Mall of America” to believe he has contemplated arson. Savage Spear of the Unicorn’s narrator, who keeps a blog like Delicious Tacos’ own, writes: “I must keep posting, or mail bombs.” Toward the end of Teenager, Bud Smith’s main characters burn down a horse barn with a dead body in it (although not before freeing the horses). As for Cormac McCarthy, his protagonists are the very progeny of annihilating fire, their father having worked on the Manhattan Project; across the cardboard box collecting The Passenger and Stella Maris an atomic “sunset” radiates, dyeing a cumulonimbus sky red, yellow, orange—from clouds of flame a face rises shrieking, flayed of skin. (The cover of Tacos’ previous book, Finally, Some Good News, also boasts a mushroom cloud, cartoonishly illustrated, with blazing buildings in the background.) Put another way, when Alfred tells Bruce Wayne in The Dark Knight, “Some men just want to watch the world burn,” he might be speaking of McCarthy, Tacos, and Mr. and Mr. Smith.
By “the world,” I mean modernity: complex and over- whelming, abstracted beyond meaning. Everything Is Totally Fine boils down 21st-century stresses best, but the agita is general across all five books—and makes all four authors ache for an idealized past. As Tacos writes in Savage Spear of the Unicorn: “The greatest job I’ve ever had still sucks. Allows me material possessions I don’t fucking need. I could pack all this shit in a pit and toss a match on it and go sleep on the ground somewhere and laugh.” Later, the narrator doubles down (spuriously, considering the impact of radiation on ecosystems): “America must be annihilated with atomic weapons. Land given back to the coyotes.” Teenager, which generally gazes clear-eyed at the dusty Old West mythos, nonetheless sends its heroine, at story’s end, back to her Italian roots (“She’d rejoin the Old World. . . . She’d just drawn her absolute last American breath”), while The Passenger’s hero lives out his days on a small Mediterranean isle. The point is that modernity—equated here with America—is FUBAR.
Yet our scribbling malcontents face a unique quandary. One cornerstone of civilization is language, with its corollary of abstract thought. As McCarthy writes in Stella Maris, “language evolved from no known need. It was just an idea . . . that one thing could represent another. A biological system under successful assault by human reason.” Couched in this niche interpretation of Darwinism, words and ideas become abominable. Therein lies the essential problem. Much as these Four Horsemen want to gallop off the page and purge the world of thoughts and words until only acts and things remain, they’re writers: Their trade is thoughts and words. The extent to which each book succeeds depends upon its author’s ability to hear and play this dissonance—whether by making peace, raging against machines, or trying to opt out, each can only fight modernity with his vocational weapons: language and ideas.
***
Zac Smith’s Everything Is Totally Fine makes a similar first impression to my friends’ incredibly anxious dog. Peering into her frightened eyes (and she is frightened of everything, but especially men and houseflies), I imagine that behind her tiny, tapered face there is another face which is constantly, wordlessly screaming.
Every sentence in the story “We Looked Under Your Skin and Only Found More Skin!” ends with an exclamation mark. After a paragraph, I got a headache; after a page, I wondered whether punctuation could produce CTE. The story follows a man going to the doctor’s office: He reads a poster about diabetes that triggers a fear of illness and its accompanying pedestrian indignities; the doctor asks about his sex life and he worries she will examine his “fat and terrible-looking” body, particularly his testicles; getting blood drawn, he reads a poster listing behaviors to cultivate mental wellbeing (“take a nap!”, “pet a dog!”, “write a story!”); he goes home, looks at the internet, and learns he does not have diabetes. The story ends: “I withdrew my penis from my wife’s vagina prior to ejaculation during intercourse! EVERYTHING WAS TOTALLY FINE!”
The slim volume comprises stories ranging from a few sentences to a few pages and is divided into three sections: “Everything Is Totally Fucked,” “Everything Is Totally Fine,” and “Everything Is Normal Life.” Each story is like a precipitous river, warning you with a title equivalent to a “Danger! Hazardous Drop” sign, pulling you along with its conversational, laconic style (“it was like three in the afternoon on a weekday”) and unusual flora and fauna (ballistic tomatoes, puppeteering mice), lulling you into a false sense of, if not security, then brief serenity, before finally dropping you—hazardously, as promised—off a falls into a plunge pool of depression. In lieu of a paddle, you may or may not get excessive exclamation marks, intermittent CAPS LOCK, or strange kerning.
Consider “The Octopus”: Upon emerging from the ocean, an octopus leaves the beach, boards a bus to city center, takes a plane to Washington, D.C., joins a tour of the White House, and slips away to hide in an air vent. Once it has “spaced out for a while,” the sea creature finds the president’s bedroom, mounts his face, and begins to suffocate him:
It waited for the president to stop breathing but then felt uncomfortable and confused and crawled off the president’s face and moved onto the president’s chest . . . . It felt the president breathing while thinking about the ocean. It moved off of the bed and sat on the windowsill. It felt tired and bored. It felt complex, inarticulable opinions about life and purpose. It felt unhappy and didn’t know what would make it happy. It reasoned that possibly nothing could.
Overall, the book features a lot of animals, ennui, United States presidents, and aborted acts of violence. There are also completed acts of violence, although they rarely bring anyone—perpetrator included—catharsis. In “Your Heartbeat as a De- pressed Man Repeatedly Smashing His Face Against the 18th-Floor Glass Window,” the narrator intentionally crashes his car at high speed, 12 children look on with schadenfreude, and a school shooter kills the 12 rubber-neckers. When the narrator “landed and died instantly, I didn’t feel any better than I did before. When the children watched me die and blow apart, they didn’t feel any better than they did before.” When the school shooter “listened to their pained screams and watched their blood and organs spill all over the pavement he didn’t feel any better than he did before.”
Few works better capture our everything-all-at-once zeitgeist in which “normal” lives are defined not by a struggle to survive but to thrive. You are supposed to eat yogurt, exercise, recycle; you’re supposed to invest wisely, send your kids to college, and “transition into consulting work to spend more time with . . . family.” This is “Normal Life 1”: “I wake up and I feel like the world will someday be a good place. I brush my teeth and I think the best years of my life are ahead of me. . . . I go to bed and I think about resting my body for the next day. I think about the rest of my life and I feel good.” Instead, you spill yogurt, wonder how emojis work, chase an empty jug rolling down the driveway. You do calisthenics and imagine the eventual death of your beloved dog and understand your “life as an accumulation of protracted effort and inevitable decay.” These discrepancies make existence more or less like being, as expressed in one of Smith’s story titles, “Happy and Content and Slowly Teaching Yourself How to Eat Glass.”
And yet. Much in the way that swimming the Amazon from source to sea might feel—if it doesn’t pummel you into quitting, or kill you—emerging from Everything Is Totally Fine is, ultimately, kind of nice. “We Looked Under Your Skin and Only Found More Skin!” may be a two-page, paper-and-ink katzenjammer, but at least to me, the story felt simultaneously stressful and weirdly comforting—like its list of coping mechanisms punctuated by a typographical analog of yelling. Take also, in its entirety, “Dog in the World”: “I made a car out of cardboard. I put the dog into the car. The dog drove away. She never came back, but I assume she is okay, based on what I know about the dog. She’s a good dog.”
Speaking, once again, of dogs: When my friends were debating whether or not to medicate theirs, we agreed that, if it reduced her symptoms, there was no reason not to—she was not a person, for whom the neurochemistry responsible for her anxiety might also produce some form of artistic genius. Giving the dachshund mix Zoloft was not going to rob us of the next Great American Novel. With Zac Smith, I would not be so quick to prescribe. Everything Is Totally Fine constitutes continuous, existential screaming—except happily, redemptively with words.
***
That I hated Delicious Tacos’ short-story collection Savage Spear of the Unicorn less than I expected to may not be a ringing endorsement, but a survey of its story titles might clarify: “Women Recently,” “You Can All Suck My Dick,” “Am I Turning Retarded,” “Her Pulsating Pussy,” “The Handjob,” “Universal Basic Woman,” “God/Pony Fucking/Jungle Slave Wife/Gay Teen Meth Whore.” It’s sort of like if you told me I was going to be taken hostage by terrorists, then I was, except that they ended up being funny and even intermittently tender, and eventually let me go—but only after torturing me, humiliating me, and threatening to use me in a snuff film.
Like Everything Is Totally Fine, Tacos’ pieces are chiefly first-person (with exceptions framed as fiction written by the narrator); the titles are provocative and the characters steeped in despair; preoccupations include penises, pets, presidents, workday drudgery, the vicissitudes of healthcare. Also like Zac Smith, Tacos can be amusing and astute and absurd, especially regarding online life and capitalism. In “Therapy Is Working,” upon failing to “experience beauty in the world,” the narrator invokes: “Some positivity. I can breathe. I don’t have cancer—except typing ‘cancer’ probably gives me cancer. Well if I have cancer I don’t know about it. Same as not having it.” “Your Pussy Your Problem” documents the Subaru dealership: A drunk has rear-ended the narrator’s Legacy and he needs to “pay three grand for new pieces of plastic so the car doesn’t make people think I’m poor.” When he complains about the delay, “[t]he manager said sometimes you go to the doctor with an appointment but you have to wait in the waiting room. Motherfucker if you were taking out my tumor that would be one thing, I said. Everyone looked up. They put me at the head of the line. If I kill someone it will be because of customer service.”
Tacos nicely encapsulates, too, the network of networks, which snares you even when you strive to better yourself: “You could watch Ingmar Bergman films for free online probably but Farewell to Ponny [Brazilian horse porn], infinitely more compelling. . . . I meant to meditate, take a shit while reading the finest literature—instead I looked at the Witcher 3 subreddit. Reread the first pages of the Unabomber manifesto.” Charlotte’s web has a message and it says, “Click here.” The biosphere offers respite—“I go look at trees and grass. Hear the birds. In nature I remember: I’m a tiny mote in God’s creation. . . . But no less perfect”—before being invariably ruined by, say, a “[w]eed whacker grinding up nests full of baby birds that would have grown up to sing.”
Everything is almost normal (if wretched) life except for the narrator’s proposed—and, to borrow from Zac Smith, totally fucked—alternative: “I’ll . . . go to Lincoln, Montana”, he tells a woman at a party. “Live in a cabin and make bombs and write a manifesto. Why don’t you come with me. . . . I’ll feed you elk meat and keep you pregnant.”
The most explicitly engaged with gender among himself, McCarthy, and the Smiths, Tacos loses perspective and thus acuity when he trains his eye on “women”—I don’t know who he’s talking about, but they’re not people I know, or people at all. Tellingly, the book’s single convincingly anthropomorphic “female” character is a 2052 version of Amazon Alexa, whose sudden sentience comes across as startling, fraught, and irreducible. Human women, on the other hand, are all dumb, malicious, or over 30 (and hence “useless”).
Tacos’ illogical yet vehement generalizations bring to mind something my grandmother used to say about my grandfather: Always wrong, but never in doubt. The narrator is convinced that: “American women don’t read books. I can’t date a retarded woman. I can’t date a normal woman. . . .” Meanwhile, I am an American woman and read two of his books for this review. After grousing that there is “[n]ot one good woman in [Los Angeles]. Probably not one in America. They live to abuse you. They live to make you dance. Then they have the sheer balls to accuse you of entitlement,” the narrator touts his “[g]enuine desire to learn and engage with these stupid women.” He also thinks “women only respect you if you’re already fucking someone hotter, and you treat them like garbage,” yet despite making asides like, “[a] car, unlike a woman, does what it’s supposed to. Would have kept all my cars for life. I eject a woman after 3 weeks,” he appears no closer to garnering feminine respect. As for sex appeal, he asserts: “All men want to fuck children,” even though his next sentence praises the “[b]ig titties”—a key morphological trait of maturity—accompanying the “[p]erfect face, like a little girl” that prompted this reflection. The universals and their counterexamples continue, but as they say, you can’t negotiate with terrorists.
And terrorist the narrator is, or at least entertains being. He may hate women, but he really, really, really wants to have sex with them. He’s simply “sick of this shit requiring effort. . . . It should just be part of nature. The world should give you pussy.” All of his troubled desire and bubbling rage combines to form a toxic potion of self-congratulation: “I deserve a medal for not knocking up underage girls in the Philippines,” “not killing my neighbor’s dog,” not pulling a Raskalnikov and murdering his aged, extortionate landlady. In “Blue State,” Tacos’ narrator disputes incel culture with brand consultants, podcasters, and other millennial ilk at a pool party: “I’ve read about this stuff, I say. I think a lot of it’s tongue in cheek.” His interlocutor protests, “Oh no, it’s quite serious—” Well, yes, our hero concludes, maybe. Either way, he knows one thing for sure: “if these guys ever do crack, it’s gonna be bigger than ISIS. There’s a lot of them.”
Which in fact does occur in Tacos’ first book. In Finally, Some Good News, the protagonist is a lonely, middle-aged office drone who wants a queen bee so badly, he delivers sensitive information to a shadow collective in exchange for a girlfriend. Then he realizes the group is ISIS and they’re going to nuke urban America, and he gets cold feet. Making him, when the fires rain down anyway, a special little snowball in hell: a man who doesn’t grieve the hive of civilization but can’t bring himself to fully embrace rape-and-machete anarchy.
Comparatively, Savage Spear of the Unicorn chronicles a narrator who has, however obliquely, grown up. He is several years sober thanks to Alcoholics Anonymous and 25K richer thanks to the sales of his first book (similar or possibly identical to or even synonymous with Finally, Some Good News), yet still depressed and still horny thanks to the fact that wherever you go, there you are. He believes “[e]ither every man is like me, or I’m the only one. Either way it’s horrifying.” Although he’s wrong on both counts—not every man is like him, but he is also not the only one—the ways in which he is wrong and wrestles with his wrongness can be riveting, as when he reasons: “Our spoiled rotten women, with their equality and voting and their birth control and not getting hit. Fuck all that. I mean, I support it politically. But there will be no next generation because no one wants to wash the fucking dishes. I get it. I don’t either.”
I dispute the narrator’s claim that he has “stopped being a misogynist”—but although his incel-curious side may support a hostile takeover, his mind, his person, can’t quite commit: As he self-ironizes in “Election”, “I’m in favor of Mexicans. I’ll vote for Hillary. But in my heart I want Trump to win and kill all minorities because I’m mad girls don’t like me.” He sympathizes, but he doesn’t organize. In other words, while you may not be able to negotiate with terrorists, in Savage Spear of the Unicorn, Delicious Tacos tries: only the terrorist with whom he parleys is himself.
***
If you’ve seen Quentin Tarantino’s Natural Born Killers—itself a riff on Bonnie and Clyde—Bud Smith’s Teenager will ring some bells: Girl and guy meet by chance and fall crazy in love, with an emphasis on crazy—but only due to their traumatic pasts; the girl’s father is sexually abusive, her mother complicit; the guy goes to prison but escapes and gives the girl a reunion gift of the murder of her parents, although her brother lives to tell the tale; the couple traipses across America committing crimes. So goes the film, and the book. Once on the road, however, the works diverge. Teenager’s Kody and Teal continue to kill people à la Natural’s Knoxes, but only by mistake or utmost necessity; the one premeditated act fails. And at the curtain, Teal and Kody will not be found starting a vigilante family in the desert—they do each flee modernity, in different ways, but must pay the boatman dearly for asylum.
Like his plot, Bud Smith’s voice in Teenager hovers between cliché and ingenuity. Crossing California’s northern border, Kody thinks, “Hello, Oregon. Hello to your canyons stupid with majestic fatso evergreens and meandering rivers doing whatever they want. . . . Hello, domain of soaring hawks, you make it look so easy.” This “freewheeling” writing—as the jacket copy puts it—seems almost childish compared to, say, Cormac McCarthy. Take a similar moment from The Passenger: In the Tennessee mountains, a “hawk appeared out of the woods below and rose effortlessly and came about and drifted quarterwise down the wind and turned and rose again and hovered. Broadwing. Buteo platypterus. It passed so close he could see its eye. Eleven millimeters. . . . The hawk turned and dipped and skated off down the slope and then rose again, sanding into the wind. Motionless.” A side-by-side of such lines makes Teenager seem its age.
Juvenile though it may be, at times, Bud Smith’s novel contains a redemptive share of nuance and defibrillating passages. Such passages come in two varieties: (1) quick, u-turning revelations about the differences between people; and (2) slow, scrolling vistas more natural than nature ever was—certainly more than the characters have ever seen it—like Thomas Cole paintings superimposed onto the contemporary United States.
The first type of passage reveals why Teenager transcends its killing spree à deux conventions, creating something new, and tender, and complicated. Watching Teal watch Kody almost never disappoints, as when: “Teal thought of the long litany of things that made up Kody. Romantic and sensitive and often wrong but seldom cruel, though he did have his confused moments. She admired him and pitied him simultaneously. . . . Kody. . . . saw Teal was looking at him like he had two heads, but she liked both heads just fine.” Touring Graceland, a pilgrimage for Elvis-obsessed Teal, they enter “a study full of TVs. There must have been fifty TVs, Kody counted. Teal saw three.” Where he projects, she accepts reality. Refracted in one another, they each cohere.
The second type of passage embodies exactly the expansiveness that these characters—so suffocated by life—seek. In a vision brought on by lasting symptoms of traumatic brain injury, Kody “saw Montana. A better place. . . . He had not had a fun time in New Jersey. Sagging power lines, heartache, hospitalizations. . . . He felt that sometimes there is a mistake at the molecular level and people are born in the wrong place at the wrong time. They have to get to the right place and they’d better hurry. . . . There was elbow room in Montana. The forty-eighth most populated state by density. . . . It was natural. . . . Lichen and wild mushrooms. Bighorn sheep.”
Homesick for a range he’s never known, Kody feels a tribal longing similar to that of Delicious Tacos’ narrator: Kody “would make Montana a heaven for all his children. They would know him and they would love him and if they did not love him for who he was, he would change for them.” Yet juxtaposed with Savage Spear of the Unicorn’s claustrophobic vision of bomb-building and pregnancy ad nauseum, Kody’s idyll leaves space for humility and difference: If he had his way, he would “Let all the cars rot and rust into red dust. Teal would be right behind him on the buffalo, or riding her own.” With one small syntactic stutter step, Teenager complicates its fantasy of manly dominance and allows Teal her autonomy.
In the end, Bud Smith cannily refuses to let his road-trippers live in la-la land. After driving stolen cars 2000 plus miles, Kody and Teal reach Kody’s dream ranch—“[b]ut there were no cowboys like he pictured, anywhere to be found. A Mexican man was unloading a rack-body truck.” A classic cowboy seems to manifest in the form of Bill Gold: a tough guy “the size of a pro wrestler,” with a thick, kerchiefed neck and “the best mustache Kody had ever seen.” Yet raiding Gold’s trailer one night, Kody discovers his idol is really Wallace J. Gould III from Pawtucket, Rhode Island—on his bookshelf rests Chicken Soup for the Cowboy’s Soul. Soon after, Teal reveals that the cattle drive from which Kody has—agonizingly—been excluded consists of caviar, rosé, a Wild West show, and tourists “bused in from Missoula” oohing and aahing as Gould drives rented cattle around a four-hour loop. Needless to say, Kody is crushed.
Naïveté renders our hero pathetic, however, only in the literal sense of ‘inspiring pathos.’ Kody’s muddled kindnesses (putting a goldfish—whose tank he broke while, yes, shooting up Teal’s parents—in a glass of water; stealing Teal a ballgown) and misguided optimism create a 21st-century Don Quixote: a knight errant who knows “errant knights had the toughest job of anybody besides the princesses, who had to put up with the heroic nonsense.” Bud Smith’s tale may lack the hilarity and the genius of Cervantes (and it’s not quite fair to compare a budding novelist to the author of what many consider the best work of fiction ever written), yet the takeaways— and the hearts—of the two books are not so different: Times are crazy, and they’ll make you crazy, but you don’t have to give up your humanity to endure them—just a little sanity.
***
Several years ago, I ran into a friend at a publishing party and we got to talking about Cormac McCarthy, whom my friend had recently met at a MacArthur Foundation dinner in New Mexico. Apparently, McCarthy had refused to be seated with the writers, insisting instead on sitting with the mathematicians and physicists. These days, my friend reported, he was only interested in talking to numbers people. It was like hearing that the cool lone wolf was eating lunch at the popular kids’ table—made additionally disorienting because this is the plot of most teen movies.
This is also largely the plot of the author’s first books in 16 years. Push- ing 90, with—among many others—a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and National Book Critics Circle Award under his concho belt, McCarthy might be called the Poet Laureate of American frontier Gnosticism. From Westerns like Blood Meridian and No Country for Old Men to The Road’s evocation of the one wilderness wilder than the West—apocalypse—McCarthy is known for staging violent dramas of tormented men against a scorching, blood-red backdrop. The ponies kick up dust and the universe is probabilistic, newly born from brim-stone and basalt.
Released two months apart and intended as a set, The Passenger and Stella Maris inherit and iterate on this tradition. Part one recounts the rambling tale of a rambling man, Bobby Western (yes, his last name is “Western”). Barely half as long, part two gives us the transcript of conversations between his schizophrenic sister, Alicia, and her psychiatrist. Both siblings are mathematical geniuses, although Bobby lags by an order of magnitude. By the time The Passenger begins, Alicia has killed herself, and Bobby is a salvage diver in New Orleans.
Named by their fictional dad for placeholder characters used in cryptographic scenarios, “Bob” and “Alice” indeed often seem a thought experiment of their authorial paterfamilias. They bear an uncanny resemblance, too, to Game of Thrones’ Cersei and Jaime Lannister: saliently good-looking, golden-haired, and doomed to misery by a powerful father and their taboo love for one another—only, unlike George R. R. Martin’s siblings, McCarthy’s both have ionospheric IQs. Which means math. As Alicia says in Stella Maris, “intelligence is numbers. It’s not words.” You don’t have to agree with this statement in order to appreciate the work in which it appears. However, as former mathematicians (Bobby switched to physics because he wasn’t as good as Alicia, then dropped out of academia when she died; Alicia retreated into a post-numerical asceticism amidst a crisis of faith), both protagonists talk seemingly ad infinitum about math—or really, mathematical lore—throughout the books. That (given numbers are Bob and Alicia’s bread, butter, and jam) this is not implausible, does not make it literarily advisable.
Suppose words are meat and math is tofu. While they are both rich in protein, they differ substantially in taste and texture. Personally, I enjoy tofu and meat, for different reasons—but it undercuts each when you try to pretend one is the other. Big chunks of The Passenger and Stella Maris smacked of this. Many readers will not know the math; some will know some; few, however, will be versed enough to recognize every reference to every theorem—and every feud—from Abdus Salam to Z bosons. It’s akin to reading hundreds of abstracts of scholarly articles without being given time to review any of the fundamental principles or check any of the work. Thus these sections of McCarthy’s books might simultaneously alienate a not-insubstantial subset of mathematically disinclined readers whom, on some level, he is calling stupid, while failing to satisfy the truly mathy among his readers. A gloss—no matter how exhaustive—of intellectual history does not satisfy a craving for the field of mathematics itself. Reading about Euler will never provide the pleasure of seeing e^(iπ) = -1 and understanding that transcendental numbers speak a common tongue.
Why is McCarthy so obsessed with math? Certain false binaries would make the domain of numbers male, words female. But McCarthy writes his uber-Einstein female, so although I do think gender anxiety pertains, the question extends beyond this reductive framework. Alicia emphasizes in Stella Maris: “Words are things we’ve made up. Mathematics is not.” Both books thus oppose language to math: biology, numbers, natural selection on one side; human reason, words, and likely sexual selection—with its ascribed menace of caprice—on the other. At the origin of this numerical fixation lurk masculine insecurities, yes, but also a distrust of culture.
Thankfully, McCarthy regains altitude when he looses numbers into narrative and logs their qualitative potency. Take The Passenger on the Trinity Test, in which Father Western watched alongside J. Robert Oppenheimer and their fellow merchants of death as, for the first time, the atomic bomb proved its potential on the New Mexico horizon: “In that mycoidal phantom blooming in the dawn like an evil lotus and in the melting of solids not heretofore known to do so stood a truth that would silence poetry a thousand years.” And then Stella Maris’s:
my father . . . put his hands over his goggles against the initial flare of light and . . . when it came he could see the bones in his fingers with his eyes closed. . . . And then the reddish purple cloud rising in billows and flowering into the iconic white mushroom. Symbol of the age. The whole thing standing slowly to ten thousand feet. The wind from the shockwave was supersonic and it hurt your ears for just a moment. And lastly of course the sound of it. The ungodly detonation followed by the slow rumble, the afterclap that rolled away over the burning countryside into a world that had never existed before this side of the sun. The desert creatures evaporating without a cry and the scientists watching with this thing standing twinned in the black lenses of their goggles. And my father watching it through his fingers like See-No-Evil.
He can even do it funny, as when Sheddan, a pill-abusing statutory rapist with some ofThe Passenger’s best lines, quips, “My father was a country storekeeper and yours a fabricator of expensive devices that make a loud noise and vaporize people.” For best results, combine with McCarthy’s eagle eye for avifauna (“three crows lifted silently out of the trees on the far side of the creek and hooked themselves away over the gray winter bottomlands”), as in this depiction of time as quasi-static: “A bird trapped in a barn that moves through the slats of light bird by bird. Whose sum is one bird.”
The genius herself suggests, “it may even be that in the end all problems are spiritual problems. As moonminded as Carl Jung was he was probably right about that.” When McCarthy’s writing wrestles with metaphysics—not elliptically or through dialectic but head-on, like David with the Angel—we get brilliance no lesser for being linguistic; not numerical, but equally transcendent.
***
Alicia Western brings me to a final, unifying thought. It is difficult to imagine a group of literary endeavors by women espousing this kind of nostalgia. Not that women can’t hate modernity—angst, even anguish in the face of repetitive clerical work or the Metaverse, for instance, goes beyond gender. Writers like Ottessa Moshfegh are plenty negative about contemporary life (see My Year of Rest and Relaxation or Homesick for Another World), but when she conceives historical alternatives (as in Lapvona), they are a far cry from paradisiacal. Seldom do you see “resetting” as aspirational—perhaps because winding back the clock rarely goes well for women. Not that it would be so great for most men. As Delicious Tacos’ literary hero Michel Houellebecq himself notes in The Elementary Particles, there's little to romanticize:
A detailed description of this pastoral ‘idyll’ is of limited interest, but . . . I will outline it broadly. You are at one with nature, have plenty of fresh air and a couple of fields to plow (the number and size of which are strictly fixed by hereditary principle). . . . You fuck right and left, mostly your wife, whose role is to give birth to children; said children grow up to take their place in the same ecosystem. Eventually, you catch something serious and you’re history.
Odds are, you’re 45.
In The Passenger, McCarthy writes: “The past is the future. Close your eyes.” This may be less wish than nihilistic anticipation. Bobby flees the New for the Old World—we might debate whether his lifestyle and denouement are feasible, but we can imagine them. For his sister, McCarthy offers no recourse: what safe and enduring freedom can a woman find on God’s original green earth? Near the end of Stella Maris—itself essentially a countdown to Alicia’s suicide—she says, “We know that women were condemned as witches because they were mentally unstable but no one has considered the numbers . . . of women who were stoned to death for being bright.” In another time, she believes, she might have “wound up chained to a cellar wall or burned at the stake. . . . I’m happy to be treated well but I know that it’s an uncertain business. When this world which reason has created is carried off at last it will take reason with it. And it will be a long time coming back.” You get the sense that she hangs herself partly out of a conviction that a reboot to this horrorscape is inevitable and she is sick of waiting.
Zac Smith, Bud Smith, Delicious Tacos, Cormac McCarthy: four men tempted by the archetype of Adam in the Garden of Eden surrounded by plants, animals, and Woman as wife and “help meet.” In “Destroy the Earth,” Tacos assures himself: “I do not care what happens to me as long as it’s not . . . anything that takes my freedom. . . . Destroy my job, destroy society, destroy the planet. I have nothing to lose.” For women—at least in a canon built on the Bible—no such illusion exists. Before she ate of the fruit and acquired knowledge, Eve had no name.