Cormac McCarthy’s Most Jewish Novels Have Little to Do with Jews, but Much to Do with Faith https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/arts-culture/2023/01/cormac-mccarthys-most-jewish-novels-have-little-to-do-with-jews-but-much-to-do-with-faith/

January 19, 2023 | Abe Greenwald
About the author:

Last year, Cormac McCarthy released two novels with intertwined plots, The Passenger (named one of Mosaic’s books of the year) and Stella Maris. Their main characters are the brilliant siblings Alice and Bobby Western, whose father was a Manhattan Project physicist and who are, respectively, a troubled mathematical genius and a thrill-seeking salvage diver. Abe Greenwald writes in his review:

The Passenger and Stella Maris are the most Jewish books McCarthy has ever written. Which is to say, they’re not very Jewish at all. But Bobby, Alice, and both their parents are Jewish. There is no evidence of their ever having been exposed to an inkling of Jewish life or thought. But it’s made unmistakably clear that they are Jews. And this raises a question: why? The answer is simple. Verisimilitude. McCarthy knows the degree to which Jews are overrepresented in math and science. His friends and colleagues at the Santa Fe Institute, [the scientific research center where he is a trustee], include or have included theorists such as Murray Gell-Mann, George Zweig, and Lawrence Krauss. He’s well aware of the statistics on Jewish genius.

As Alice says to [the psychiatrist] Dr. Cohen, “Jews represent 2 percent of the population and 80 percent of the mathematicians. If those numbers were even a little more skewed we’d be talking about a separate species.” Some might bristle at the “separate species” remark, but it’s clear McCarthy means it only in reverence.

When it comes to religion, however, the books offer a message of more substance

Alice says . . . in Stella Maris: “Mathematics is ultimately a faith-based initiative. And faith is an uncertain business.” This is McCarthy’s check on scientism, the secular faith that purports to answer all of life’s meaningful questions through the process of observation, experimentation, equation, and peer review. And McCarthy knows whereof he speaks. . . . He edits books and papers from some of the country’s most accomplished scientists on a broad range of topics. Science and math, by his own admission, have come to occupy him more than literature. Thus, he addresses the faith-vs.-science debate from a much-needed perspective. And that perspective, embodied in both Bobby and Alice, is this: science and mathematics are vital in telling us how little we can ever understand, and a world so inscrutable makes faith and mysticism at least a viable avenue of contemplation.

Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentary.org/articles/abe-greenwald/the-passenger-stella-maris-cormac-mccarthy/