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The Orchard Keeper / Suttree / Blood Meridian
Omnibus of Cormac McCarthy's three novels: The Orchard Keeper, Suttree and Blood Meridian.
1054 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
3 people are currently reading
545 people want to read
About the author
Cormac McCarthy
49 books28.8k followersCormac McCarthy was a highly acclaimed American novelist and screenwriter celebrated for his distinctive literary style, philosophical depth, and exploration of violence, morality, and the human condition. His writing, often characterized by sparse punctuation and lyrical, biblical language, delved into the primal forces that shape human behavior, set against the haunting landscapes of the American South and Southwest.
McCarthy’s early novels, including The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, established him as a powerful voice in Southern Gothic literature, while Blood Meridian (1985) is frequently cited as his magnum opus—a brutal, visionary epic about violence and manifest destiny in the American West. In the 1990s, his "Border Trilogy"—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain—garnered widespread popularity and critical acclaim, blending coming-of-age themes with philosophical introspection and tragic realism.
His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film by the Coen brothers, and his harrowing post-apocalyptic tale The Road (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was also made into a major motion picture. Both works brought him mainstream recognition and a broader readership later in his career.
Despite his fame, McCarthy remained famously private and rarely gave interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself. His legacy endures through his powerful, often unsettling portrayals of humanity’s struggle with fate, violence, and redemption, making him one of the most influential and original voices in modern American literature.
McCarthy’s early novels, including The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark, established him as a powerful voice in Southern Gothic literature, while Blood Meridian (1985) is frequently cited as his magnum opus—a brutal, visionary epic about violence and manifest destiny in the American West. In the 1990s, his "Border Trilogy"—All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain—garnered widespread popularity and critical acclaim, blending coming-of-age themes with philosophical introspection and tragic realism.
His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film by the Coen brothers, and his harrowing post-apocalyptic tale The Road (2006) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was also made into a major motion picture. Both works brought him mainstream recognition and a broader readership later in his career.
Despite his fame, McCarthy remained famously private and rarely gave interviews, preferring to let his work speak for itself. His legacy endures through his powerful, often unsettling portrayals of humanity’s struggle with fate, violence, and redemption, making him one of the most influential and original voices in modern American literature.
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
March 26, 2023
McCarthy is funnier than I remember. It's been about a decade since I read his work so maybe I have just forgotten his sly humor. Don't get me wrong, though, this is still McCarthy and 'Suttree' is a depressing book. Perhaps the darkest of his that I have read. But you don't come to McCarthy to cheer yourself up; you come for a dose of hard truth and wonderful prose, and you get that in spades in 'Suttree'. There seems to be a camp of his fans who argue that this is his masterpiece. I don't agree. I am on team 'Blood Meridian' in that regard. I wouldn't recommend either to any newcomers though. Start with the more approachable works like 'The Road', 'The Border Trilogy' or 'No Country for Old Men'. Save the heavy hitters for last. Prepare to be wowed. Prepare to be discouraged.
What do you believe?
I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari Passu.
Equally?
It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul.
What do you believe?
I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari Passu.
Equally?
It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul.
May 26, 2013
Reviewing this bc I couldn't find the regular versions of Blood Meridian or Suttrree. Both are in my top ten favorite books (w/ Meridian in my top 5). My first read of Blood Meridian was one of the most thrilling reading experiences I have ever had. Its predecessors are the King James Bible, Moby Dick, and Faulkner. It is bleak, apocalyptic, and utterly transfixing. And it has one of the all time great characters - The Judge.
Suttree is a much different work, but also great. It is drunk on language like all the best river novels. It also has a few sections that are laugh out loud funny, a rarity for McCarthy. I was hooked from the start, due to the fantastic, phantasmagoric prologue.
Suttree is a much different work, but also great. It is drunk on language like all the best river novels. It also has a few sections that are laugh out loud funny, a rarity for McCarthy. I was hooked from the start, due to the fantastic, phantasmagoric prologue.
March 26, 2015
What do you catch?
Suttree smiled. Carp and catfish, he said. Might catch a drum now and then. Or a gar.
Man don't always catch what he's fishing for.
That summarizes Suttree. A meandering (very Faulknerish) tale. In lieu of plot the novel brings the young man Suttree more and more into focus... Answering the question: who is he? What is he looking for? From whom or what does he run?
He befriends the fringes of society while rejecting the easy and educated life that he comes from. He rejects his family, and even the family he created. He does it without judgment. His attempts to connect with his community of stressed and desperate lives are all done with earnest concern... He wants to know them all... but for what reason?
I have a thing to tell you. I know all souls are one and all souls are lonely
That's how Suttree sums up his experience. And this is how he perceives he'll be judged:
Mr Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trull, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots, and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagets,rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.
I was drunk, cried Suttree.
March 29, 2023
The Orchard Keeper:
The Orchard Keeper is McCarthy’s debut novel first published in 1965. Revisiting his earliest work is like traveling back in time to engage the mind of a young genius and discover where his brilliance originated. Although this first novel can be challenging to grasp due to its circuitous narrative structure, it has an impassioned and spellbinding quality in which you should just surrender to the lushness and incandescence of the prose and allow fragments of a story to emerge from the elusive plot.
The best way to experience The Orchard Keeper is to approach it as episodic for the glimpses of rural life it offers and as panoramic for the breathtaking vistas and changing seasons it describes. Three protagonists gain the most attention within the constant splicing up of the chapters. John Wesley Rattner is fourteen and fatherless as he grows up in the rural backwoods of eastern Tennessee. John befriends two local outcasts: Marion Sylder and an “old man” also referred to as Uncle Ather or Mr Ownby.
Marion is a bootlegger, and neither John nor Marion is ever aware that the man Marion has killed is John’s father. (The elder Rattner caused his own death by attacking Marion.) As for the “old man” he frequents the pages almost like a phantom while he traverses the orchards and mountains. It’s often hard to distinguish these three from the many other characters who cross paths throughout the narrative. In fact, John, Marion, and old man Uncle/Ownby have only a handful of scenes, but the few are touching and unforgettable.
Mostly, the novel takes on two main facets: it revolves around chronicling the denizens of Tennessee’s rural communities in the years between the World Wars, and it serves as a canvas for McCarthy to utilize his mesmerizing gifts of poetic language to paint natural landscapes and capture the raging cycles of the seasons. The lyricism in The Orchard Keeper is unlike anything you can experience in literature, but if you’re approaching McCarthy for the first time and start with his first book, you may find yourself puzzled even though you can praise the genius of his writing.
Suttree:
Suttree is McCarthy’s longest book, and it could be debated it’s also his best work. Possibly less debatable might be how anyone who commits to take the journey of this remarkable, yet demanding, novel will discover it is mesmerizing to the point where you know you’ve experienced something rare and extraordinary. Nothing in literature quite compares to McCarthy’s use of language in Suttree. His prose is exhilarating beyond poetic. It redefines profound to the extent of mindboggling, bewildering, and downright stunning in its lushness, bizarreness, and beauty.
Besides the euphoria of the novel’s prose, I’m fascinated with Cornelius Suttree, the title character. He roams the fringes of society and lives in a houseboat on the Tennessee River. Having fallen out of grace with his affluent family, he makes a tentative living as a fisherman. Apart from traversing the river, he frequents bars and cafes and befriends many of the pariahs and outcasts of Knoxville’s marginal community. Inebriation often leaves Suttree in dire circumstances. The brunt of the narrative tracks his days through the changing of the seasons one year to the next as he interacts with and offers support and aid to vagrants and those who have been formerly incarcerated like himself. His relations with his estranged family and his relationships with women also give the narrative added drama and dark humor.
Although an overwhelming degree of self-inflicted sorrow envelops Suttree’s life, his indomitable resilience to survive and find a path forward for himself counteracts the indignity in which he often allows himself to flounder in. A story like Suttree’s is best approached with allowing yourself to become entirely surrendered to the often baffling and spellbinding atmospheric world McCarthy imagines. Although rooted in the hardships of poverty-stricken reality, McCarthy likes to transcend into dreamlike realms where he meditates the conscious boundaries between life and death. In doing so, he employs prose like a wizard conjuring the ingenuity of words.
Especially with his breathtaking descriptions of the natural environment, McCarthy’s genius is inimitable with reinventing the capabilities of language, and Suttree is equally as unmatched in comparing it to any novel in literature other than McCarthy’s other masterpieces, which have the ability to astonish. Suttree can be challenging and time-demanding in asking for patience to take in the rigors of its narrative, but I savored it for the extraordinariness it offers and I feel rewarded to have taken this phenomenal literary journey, regardless whether it often left me exhausted.
Blood Meridian:
Blood Meridian is debatably McCarthy’s crowning achievement. The novel depicts in stunning detail the violence and depravity that stretched across the southwestern border in the 1850s. The central character of the narrative is the “kid.” Without any family, he travels alone from Tennessee to the border region where he latches onto a violent group of mercenaries contracted to take the scalps of Indian renegades who have been terrorizing towns ranging from Texas to California.
The kid’s experiences are an understatement of baptism by violence. The ruthless lifestyle of the ragtag group of cowboy militia includes many memorable characters, such as Glanton, Toadvine, and the monster of a man, Judge Holden, simply called “the judge.” Even as McCarthy envisions unspeakable acts of barbarity, passages in Blood Meridian reach profound levels of grandeur and beauty. In fact, his literary style and lyrical language are unparalleled in American literature.
As a premonition on cruelty, Blood Meridian reflects upon history’s atrocities and the madness carried forward from an infinite past. Regardless of what you take away from this novel, McCarthy’s vision is on full display of examining the terrifying presence of human violence through his signature use of breathtaking prose.
The Orchard Keeper is McCarthy’s debut novel first published in 1965. Revisiting his earliest work is like traveling back in time to engage the mind of a young genius and discover where his brilliance originated. Although this first novel can be challenging to grasp due to its circuitous narrative structure, it has an impassioned and spellbinding quality in which you should just surrender to the lushness and incandescence of the prose and allow fragments of a story to emerge from the elusive plot.
The best way to experience The Orchard Keeper is to approach it as episodic for the glimpses of rural life it offers and as panoramic for the breathtaking vistas and changing seasons it describes. Three protagonists gain the most attention within the constant splicing up of the chapters. John Wesley Rattner is fourteen and fatherless as he grows up in the rural backwoods of eastern Tennessee. John befriends two local outcasts: Marion Sylder and an “old man” also referred to as Uncle Ather or Mr Ownby.
Marion is a bootlegger, and neither John nor Marion is ever aware that the man Marion has killed is John’s father. (The elder Rattner caused his own death by attacking Marion.) As for the “old man” he frequents the pages almost like a phantom while he traverses the orchards and mountains. It’s often hard to distinguish these three from the many other characters who cross paths throughout the narrative. In fact, John, Marion, and old man Uncle/Ownby have only a handful of scenes, but the few are touching and unforgettable.
Mostly, the novel takes on two main facets: it revolves around chronicling the denizens of Tennessee’s rural communities in the years between the World Wars, and it serves as a canvas for McCarthy to utilize his mesmerizing gifts of poetic language to paint natural landscapes and capture the raging cycles of the seasons. The lyricism in The Orchard Keeper is unlike anything you can experience in literature, but if you’re approaching McCarthy for the first time and start with his first book, you may find yourself puzzled even though you can praise the genius of his writing.
Suttree:
Suttree is McCarthy’s longest book, and it could be debated it’s also his best work. Possibly less debatable might be how anyone who commits to take the journey of this remarkable, yet demanding, novel will discover it is mesmerizing to the point where you know you’ve experienced something rare and extraordinary. Nothing in literature quite compares to McCarthy’s use of language in Suttree. His prose is exhilarating beyond poetic. It redefines profound to the extent of mindboggling, bewildering, and downright stunning in its lushness, bizarreness, and beauty.
Besides the euphoria of the novel’s prose, I’m fascinated with Cornelius Suttree, the title character. He roams the fringes of society and lives in a houseboat on the Tennessee River. Having fallen out of grace with his affluent family, he makes a tentative living as a fisherman. Apart from traversing the river, he frequents bars and cafes and befriends many of the pariahs and outcasts of Knoxville’s marginal community. Inebriation often leaves Suttree in dire circumstances. The brunt of the narrative tracks his days through the changing of the seasons one year to the next as he interacts with and offers support and aid to vagrants and those who have been formerly incarcerated like himself. His relations with his estranged family and his relationships with women also give the narrative added drama and dark humor.
Although an overwhelming degree of self-inflicted sorrow envelops Suttree’s life, his indomitable resilience to survive and find a path forward for himself counteracts the indignity in which he often allows himself to flounder in. A story like Suttree’s is best approached with allowing yourself to become entirely surrendered to the often baffling and spellbinding atmospheric world McCarthy imagines. Although rooted in the hardships of poverty-stricken reality, McCarthy likes to transcend into dreamlike realms where he meditates the conscious boundaries between life and death. In doing so, he employs prose like a wizard conjuring the ingenuity of words.
Especially with his breathtaking descriptions of the natural environment, McCarthy’s genius is inimitable with reinventing the capabilities of language, and Suttree is equally as unmatched in comparing it to any novel in literature other than McCarthy’s other masterpieces, which have the ability to astonish. Suttree can be challenging and time-demanding in asking for patience to take in the rigors of its narrative, but I savored it for the extraordinariness it offers and I feel rewarded to have taken this phenomenal literary journey, regardless whether it often left me exhausted.
Blood Meridian:
Blood Meridian is debatably McCarthy’s crowning achievement. The novel depicts in stunning detail the violence and depravity that stretched across the southwestern border in the 1850s. The central character of the narrative is the “kid.” Without any family, he travels alone from Tennessee to the border region where he latches onto a violent group of mercenaries contracted to take the scalps of Indian renegades who have been terrorizing towns ranging from Texas to California.
The kid’s experiences are an understatement of baptism by violence. The ruthless lifestyle of the ragtag group of cowboy militia includes many memorable characters, such as Glanton, Toadvine, and the monster of a man, Judge Holden, simply called “the judge.” Even as McCarthy envisions unspeakable acts of barbarity, passages in Blood Meridian reach profound levels of grandeur and beauty. In fact, his literary style and lyrical language are unparalleled in American literature.
As a premonition on cruelty, Blood Meridian reflects upon history’s atrocities and the madness carried forward from an infinite past. Regardless of what you take away from this novel, McCarthy’s vision is on full display of examining the terrifying presence of human violence through his signature use of breathtaking prose.
March 18, 2014
Blood Meridian is a terrific book. McCarthy's prose is amazing, and his ability to capture the time of early Texas is unparralled.
November 7, 2023
Blood Meridian and Suttree are the strongest efforts of this triad — the earlier work leaves a bit to be desired, but still manages to entertain with Faulkneresque style. Overall a very good trilogy that will please all fans of this author.
September 2, 2018
Suttree stands as another powerful treatise on male disillusionment, which is to say it is at times comical, but more often bordering on tragedy. It is a stark portrait of a single character (Suttree) who forgoes many of the responsibilities and securities of society in favor of a more naked freedom that comes with violence, sickness, and hardship. Something deep within his psyche has come to refute the premise of a normal life, and McCarthy seeks to navigate this soul with some of his most experimental and lyrical prose, with flowing passages that harken back to the Modernists.
November 24, 2021
I hate leaving books unfinished but I almost put this one down. I struggled to get to the end but I kept telling myself SOMETHING interesting would happen to make my time spent on this book worthwhile. Pages and pages of descriptive text with no point to any of it. I feel no connection with any of the characters. It left me neither thoughtful nor entertained.
September 5, 2019
maybe this was too much for me. I did enjoy his characters somewhat, but just the actual reading of the thousands of difficult words made this a task. Not to be undertaken without forethought. I found this more difficult than 'The Road'.
July 11, 2012
So vivid. One wonders how he can write like this. How anyone can.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews