McCarthy's math prodigy

[Matthew Schlecht]

No, not that McCarthy, the recently fallen-from-grace Speaker of the House - the recently late Cormac McCarthy.

His final novels, "The Passenger" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Passenger_(McCarthy_novel)] and "Stella Maris" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stella_Maris_(novel)] (2022) feature an interesting character, Alicia Western, who is a math prodigy who also suffers from schizophrenia and except for flashbacks is institutionalized during her appearances in the first novel and all of the second novel.

Alicia spends a lot of time explaining mathematics to her analyst, and the explanations are quite detailed. I must admit that I am quickly lost, and I wonder how McCarthy became so conversant in the field. There was no inkling of that in his earlier work.

I'm just wondering whether the math discourses hold up under scrutiny - I can't tell - and I recall that we have a resident math aficionado on this list.

The novels also feature a very memorable character known as the "Thalidomide Kid", who inhabits and directs Alicia's hallucinatory adventures.

Matthew