Stella Maris, Cormac McCarthy, author; Julia Whelan, Edoardo Ballerini, narrators
Stella Maris is a psychiatric hospital in Wisconsin. It is 1972, and Alicia Western, a 20 year old young woman, a veritable genius in Mathematics, signs herself into the hospital, for the third time. She carries nothing with her but a bag filled with money. She meets Dr. Cohen, who engages her in conversation several times a week, as he treats her illness and draws her out. She has been diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic by some, but confounds others.
Her brother Bobby is dying in a hospital in Italy, the result of an automobile accident. She ran away from there, without telling anyone. She did not want to be pressured and forced into making the decision to detach him from life support. There is a concern for her safety, since she speaks of suicide. Since age 12, she has had what I will refer to as “imaginary friends”, though she believes that they are very real, and she engages with them. One is “the kid” who has no hands. Rather he has flippers. She has other visitors as well, and they seem to serve her needs. They seem to come and go at times over which she has no control. She has a condition called synesthesia. It is a condition in which one sense triggers an automatic reaction in another, like when a word might be seen as a color or a particular taste might accompany it. She refuses medication because it alters “her” reality which she knows is different than the reality of the doctor who treats her. She also believes they are not able to help her aside from giving her medication that doesn’t help, but boosts the profits of the pharmaceutical industry instead. She does not want meds or a constant minder.
Her parents were both involved with the development of the bomb at Los Alamos. They are both deceased now. Now her brother is “leaving her” as well, a brother for whom she has what is considered an unhealthy love, and she dreams of an incestuous affair with him. He has refused her attempt to make him reciprocate her forbidden feelings and emotions.
Not even 20 years old, she was in the doctoral program at the University of Chicago, and shortly before she was to complete it, she abandoned it and ran away. She seemed to make a habit of running away from responsibility and completing an effort. She finds it hard to deal with the loss in life that we all must face as people enter and exit “this mortal coil”, according to some greater plan. She is often sad, though she denies it. She seems to have never found either a true place in the world or an acceptable one. She seemed to sense the endings in life, and that was when her sadness and loneliness seemed most obvious. She was unfulfilled, largely because of her own efforts, but she was trying to get well or she would not have gone to the hospital.
I found her, in her madness, to seem cogent, as her explanations often seemed to make so much sense, even when I did not agree with what she said, or didn’t fully understand all of it. Some of the explanations in math and science were simply over my head, but her approach and obvious understanding of the subject matter, made me feel that she might have a rational point that I missed. I positively enjoyed the conversations between the patient and the doctor, which sometimes bordered on banter. Sometimes, her responses evoked a deeper response from the doctor than he was able to elicit from the patient. She understood that she suffered from some form of mental illness; she had no faith in the doctors who were treating her because many weren’t even sure of how to really diagnose her. When she was rational, she was aware of the fact that she wasn’t like other people, but then, she believed they weren’t like he, so how could they understand her. I began to wonder who was sane and who was not! No one could get into her mind; no one could touch her feelings or truly understand her pain. She could not fit in and understood that all things ended. It was that very thought, perhaps that lack of control, that was so difficult for her to manage and was what drove her to the depths of sadness, that she sometimes reached.
The two audio narrators conducted a conversation as doctor and patient that was as good as a living performance, though it appeared only in my mind. Although this is he second of a two-book series, I found it fine as a stand alone.