And since the Z carried no charge this meant that the neutrino coming in would stay a neutrino.” At times, the narratives feel disjointed and bogged down in arcane details and enigmatic concepts, for example, in a passage where Bobby discusses the theories of physicist Steven Weinberg: “Still he figured that if you had these neutrino-nucleon collisions that spun off the W particle and gave you a lepton with the opposite charge you’d have to get a Z particle every once in a while. The novels are wildly different from anything he’s done before. “Even if he’s not practicing mathematics and physics, there’s something beautiful to him about the unyielding quality of a difficult thought,” said Krakauer, who read early versions of the novels. In one passage, McCarthy writes with reverence about gravitons - hypothetical elementary particles with no mass - and describes one as “a creature imagined but never seen.” In another, he compares the incremental nature of time passing to “a bird trapped in a barn that moves through the slats of light bird by bird. Characters debate byzantine concepts like S-Matrix theory, string theory and the general relativistic theory of gravitation, and they discuss the ideas of pioneering physicists like Gerard ‘t Hooft, Sheldon Glashow, Ludwig Boltzmann, Richard Feynman and George Zweig, a particle physicist who has corresponded with McCarthy and read his latest work. While the Westerns’ doomed love story drives the narratives, McCarthy seems most interested in his characters’ ideas about the nature of time and reality. The story unfolds as dialogue between Alicia and her doctors, as she describes how her pursuit of revolutionary mathematical theories brought her to the brink of madness. She is suicidal and hears voices that manifest as characters from a vaudevillian nightmare, including the Kid, a foul-mouthed dwarf with flippers for hands. “Stella Maris” unfolds in 1972 at a mental institution in Wisconsin, where Alicia has been admitted and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He sheds his identity but can’t escape his past, and he is tormented by memories of Alicia, a mentally unstable genius who killed herself. After his co-worker turns up dead, he is trailed by strange men in suits and goes on the run. Set mostly in New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in 1980, it follows Bobby, who works as a salvage diver and discovers something suspicious in the wreckage of a sunken jet. At nearly 400 pages, “The Passenger” reads at times like a thriller, albeit a digressive, metaphysical one. The novels tell the tragic story of Bobby and Alicia Western, siblings who are haunted by their physicist father’s role in the development of the atomic bomb, and by their romantic longing for each other. He is known for his blood-soaked morality tales set in the American Southwest, swaggering works like “All the Pretty Horses” and “No Country for Old Men,” and for his spare post-apocalyptic epic, “The Road.” The intertwined narratives, which focus on a brilliant, tortured young mathematical prodigy and her brother, represent a stylistic and thematic break for McCarthy. 6, are his first novels in 16 years, and they directly tackle the thorny ideas and theories that have long preoccupied him. “The Passenger,” which Knopf published late last month, and “Stella Maris,” coming on Dec. Now those obsessions are seeping into McCarthy’s fiction. “He’s been living exclusively with theorists for at least 25 years. “He’s a permanent fixture in our community,” said David Krakauer, an evolutionary theorist and professor at the institute who has become friends with McCarthy. McCarthy, 89, is private, but he’s hardly a recluse: He spends much of his time speaking to philosophers and physicists at the Santa Fe Institute, a research center where he serves as a trustee. (Knopf via AP) Photo: Associated Pressįor decades, novelist Cormac McCarthy has steeped himself in esoteric subjects like quantum physics, the philosophy of mathematics and theories about the origins of intelligence and the nature of consciousness. This combination of images released by Knopf shows cover art for companion novels "The Passenger," left, and "Stella Maris" by Cormac McCarthy.
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