Subterranean Treasures.

If one interprets The Passenger and Stella Maris according to the aesthetic axioms that guided some of the most celebrated literary debuts by writers of my generation - say what you mean; write what you know; speak only for yourself, which is to say only about yourself - then one might indeed conclude that Bobby Western is an autofictional stand-in for McCarthy, and that the "confusing" nature of the novels is the product of the limitations of a "confused" writer who simply doesn't know his craft well enough to deliver an easy-to-follow story. BOOKS & the ARTS IN A MOVING TRIBUTE TO HIS FRIEND Ned Rorem, the American composer famous for art songs and sex diaries, who died last year at 99, the critic Joshua Barone reports that one of Rorem's signature gags was to insist that everything in the world - from music to food to people - was either German or French. Taking place in the 1970s and '80s, McCarthy's new novels follow Bobby and Alicia Western, two tragically intelligent siblings who share a genius for numbers and abstraction, an almost theological guilt over their father's role in the creation of the atomic bomb, and a love for each other so passionate that it transgresses the oldest and most fundamental human law: Never desire your own blood. Although The Passenger opens with a description of Alicia's lifeless body, McCarthy frequently interrupts his account of Bobby's grief to transport us back in time and regale us with - or subject us to - terrifying vignettes of her hallucinations. [Extracted from the article]