But dreams die hard. In McCarthy’s pair of new novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, they don’t die at all—neither the dreams of his characters, whose ectoplasmic residue is constantly dripping across the boundary between reality and hallucination, nor McCarthy’s dream of the Santa Fe Institute, which resides almost in hiding at the moral center of the diptych. These are deliberately frustrating novels. They hint at plot development that never quite materializes; they contain hundreds of pages of obscure Socratic dialogue between personages real and imagined; in the final analysis, they resist any straightforward reconstruction of “what really happened.”
