Be an EX-Suicide

On McCarthy's Stella Maris

Cormac McCarthy published his first novel The Orchard Keeper in 1965—the same year that Flannery O’Connor’s short story collection Everything Rises Must Converge came out posthumously, and the year before Walker Percy published The Last Gentleman. If those Southern Catholic novels feel a century away, how astounding is it that McCarthy published among them? And even more impressive, that his final two novels were published in 2022, and from my perspective, showcase the height of his literary powers? Many critics have compared McCarthy’s work to O’Connor and Percy: he shares her penchant for violence and the gothic and the latter’s existentialist philosophical discourse.