Suttree

by Cormac McCarthy

Librarian note: alternate-cover edition of 9780330306423.

Cornelius Suttree lives alone and in exile in a disintegrating houseboat on the wrong side of the Tennessee River. Despite this, he manages to rise above the physical and human squalor of the surrounding community, surviving the dereliction and destitution with dignity.

Genres: Fiction, Southern Gothic, Classics, Literature, Novels, American, Literary Fiction

471 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1979

About the author

Cormac 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.

Reviews

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Mr. Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein nigh 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, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.

I was drunk, cried Suttree."

You were indeed Mr. Cornelius Suttree. You drank the river dry. Why, Suttree, why must you be so? You are a bright boy and there is really no call for you to be hanging about with the lowest of the low. You could have made something of yourself. You came from a good family...well most of the family tree seems pretty solid.

"Mr. Suttree in what year did your greatuncle Jeffrey pass away?

It was in 1884.

Did he die by natural causes?

No sir.

And what were the circumstances surrounding his death.

He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way.

Our information is that he was hanged for a homicide.

Yessir."

Every family has a few hiccups.

You don't like your family much. You are in hiding not only from them, but a wife and a son you left behind. You make a haphazard living running a trot line. Selling fish for nickles and dimes don't put much comfort in the belly. You live on the river in an abandoned house boat. That boat might be fine in the summer time, but it sure got damned cold in the winter time didn't it sir?



"Ice lay along the shore, frangible plates skewed up and broken on the mud and the small icegardens whitely all down the drained and frozen flats where delicate crystal columns sprouted from the mire. He hauled forth is shriveled giblet and pissed a long and smoking piss into the river and spat and buttoned and went in again. He kicked the door shut and stood before the stove in a gesture of enormous exhortation. A frozen hermit. His lower jaw in a seizure."

Your best friend, Gene Harrogate is a melonmounter. Yes, he stuck his dingus in a variety of citrullus vulgaris. They sent him to prison. What the hell else were they supposed to do with him? Once they found out in prison things got rough for the both of you didn't it Suttree? "The crimes of the moonlight melonmounter followed him as crimes will." Yes sirree a prison bad ass put lumps on both your skulls.

The Patch where Harrogate fell in lust.

Your other friend Billy Ray likes to beat up cops. He is barely recovered from one assault when he takes on another trio of cops. These aren't the right sorts of people to be friends with. You can't expect to live a long and healthy life surrounding yourself with people like this.

Are you sad Suttree?

You hook up with this pretty filly from Chicago. Wasn't her name Joyce? Yes, yes here it is in my notes... Joyce from Chicago. You really liked Joyce didn't ya? That woman knows her way around a penis.

There was all together too much of her sitting there, the broad expanse of thigh cradled in the insubstantial stocking and garters with the pale flesh pursed and her full breasts and the sootblack piping of her eyelids, a gaudish rake of metaldust in prussian blue where cerulean moths had fluttered her wake from some outlandish dream. Suttree gradually going away in the sheer outrageous sentience of her. Their glasses clicked on the tabletop. Her hot spiced tongue fat in his mouth and her hands all over him liked the very witch of fuck.

Unfortunately Joyce needs to keep plying her trade to keep you in clothes, toiletries, and living quarters. You are pretty cool about it, but the life of a whore starts to wear on her, and when she starts putting on weight then the real fireworks started. Yes indeed, one thing we know you are good at Suttree...yes we do...we know you are good at running.

Are you sad Suttree? Is it soul sadness?

It is no wonder you end up in the hospital with Typhoid Fever. You never eat right and you drink too much. You shiver and shake and suffer heat stroke. Your immune system is almost nonexistence. You almost checked out my friend. And now you have this writer...this Cormac McCarthy character from Knoxville who wrote a book about you.

Cormac McCarthy

The questions will just never end now. So what's next for Suttree? At the end of the book you are, supposedly, finally shaking the dust of Tennessee from your clothes. "He was a man with no plans for going back the way he'd come nor telling any soul at all what he had seen."

Too late Suttree, you are just too damn late.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
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[karen · Rating 5 out of 5]

like faulkner, except good...

[Luís · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am at a loss for words to discuss this book. There were many words that I did not understand. Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy, is a book that deserves the same attention as some of Malick's films. The pen of the Big Mac is like a brush taking its time on the canvas, where a sentence would suffice to describe a flight of birds making crates. Here, we are far from Kerouac and his minor ballads on the road.
Here is America lost. At the edge of Knoxville live the outcasts, the excluded, voluntary or not, of the system; there are whores, alcoholics, beggars, blind, black, white, fighting, it spells, it survives.
Occasionally, there are chance meetings, beautiful cars, and rotten rooms for $5 a week when winter is too harsh and the river freezes. There are little coffee tricks, the cola watered with whiskey adulterated, and the grocery store around this court of miracles.
Again, I could say that this novel is rich, beautiful, and superbly written. Cormac is a genius.

[Orsodimondo · Rating 4 out of 5]

NELLE TENEBRE DELLA NOTTE TUTTE LE ANIME SONO UNA SOLA


Versione extra lusso ed extra large della casa di Suttree.

Un McCarthy diverso. E per certi versi direi molto diverso, in questo suo opus magnum, il suo romanzo più voluminoso, e da molti considerato il suo capolavoro (forse anche per la lunga gestazione, una ventina d’anni): non da me però, che pur avendolo apprezzato e goduto, rimango legato ai suoi quattro “western”.

Diverso non solo per mole, ma anche per stile e tono.
È il suo libro più divertente, se così può dire, quello dove la sua ironia traspare maggiormente.
È opera in qualche modo rapsodica, frammentata: la trama è lasca, si compone e desume a posteriori.
Ma McCarthy non segue una griglia narrativa, di sicuro non una rigida: va avanti e indietro nel tempo (principalmente la storia è collocata nei primi anni Cinquanta), cambia persona, anche se per la maggior parte del tempo vince la terza singolare, il classico narratore, si focalizza su singole scene, combatte la sua personale battaglia contro le virgole (e virgolette, queste ultime le odia proprio) che sostituisce con la preposizione “e”, sembra soprattutto concentrato a descrivere il paesaggio, a far parlare il ‘territorio’.
E continua a lasciarci fuori dalla mente dei suoi personaggi.


Versione bucolica di Suttree a pesca sul fiume Tennessee.

Suttree è il cognome del protagonista. Che di nome fa Cornelius, ma viene perlopiù chiamato con diminutivi e appellativi vari, tipo Buddy, Bud, Sut.
È rampollo di famiglia benestante, la classica ‘buona’ famiglia del sud. Per qualche motivo non meglio precisato, Suttree la abbandona e a suo modo rinnega. Si lascia dietro anche una giovane moglie con un figlio piccolissimo.
Di questa sua famiglia facciamo conoscenza verso un quarto del romanzo quando Suttree torna a ‘casa’ perché ha saputo che il suo bambino è morto (malattia): la moglie lo accoglie nel peggiore dei modi, e altrettanto fa la famiglia d’origine. Al funerale Suttree rimane in disparte, per poi trattenersi da solo a ricoprire di terra la fossa dove è stata calata la piccola bara, mentre intorno gli addetti alle onoranze funebri gli fanno notare che col trattore che hanno portato si farebbe prima.


Versione pastorale della campagna intorno a Knoxville.

Suttree mi pare il meno granitico e laconico dei protagonisti mccarthyani, che spesso sembrano affetti da mutismo.
Ma accanto a protagonisti parchi di parole, McCarthy pone spesso personaggi loquaci, se non addirittura logorroici: come il celebre verboso giudice Holden nel Meridiano di sangue, come qui il giovane Harrogate, che verrebbe da definire povero di mente, o se non altro molto ingenuo (viene arrestato perché colto in flagrante di notte in un campo di cocomeri a fornicare con i grossi frutti).


Il fiume Tennessee con i battelli che lo percorrono, che come i treni ricorrono spesso nel romanzo.

Nel ‘territorio’, nel paesaggio perlopiù urbano, qualche volta campestre, è inclusa ovviamente anche la fauna umana. E qui ce n’è un bel campionario: il capraio, il cenciaiolo, il ferroviere, i pescatori, il… Un mondo rurale che vive ai margini della città (Knoxville, Tennessee), nei quartieri bassi, un’umanità povera, esclusa dal processo del progresso anche per propria scelta, che sembra andare contro la corrente, insofferente alle autorità e alle istituzioni, senzatetto ladruncoli ubriaconi sottoproletari. Un’umanità che trascorre la vita (perché noi siamo chi e cosa siamo), la cui principale occupazione è mettere il pranzo insieme con la cena, procurarsi da mangiare, anche tra i rifiuti, arrangiarsi (perfino a lavorare se necessario) per potersi sedere a tavola con un piatto davanti che contenga qualcosa di commestibile.


Cartolina di Gay Street verso il 1910.

È gente così che Suttree sceglie di vivere e frequentare, nel momento in cui abbandona la magione di famiglia per andare a vivere in una casetta galleggiante sul fiume Tennessee nella periferia di Knoxville. Gente conosciuta nel suo soggiorno dietro le sbarre, anche se quella prigione viene definita campo di lavoro: eppure le condizioni sono le medesime, i secondini picchiano col manganello, la mensa fa schifo, le celle pure, e chi fa casino finisce in una gabbia-scatola di dimensioni meno che ridotte. Da questo luogo gli amici di Suttree entrano ed escono: e ogni volta che sono dentro annunciano che quella è l’ultima, una volta fuori nessuno ce li riporterà. Ma poi succede di nuovo.
E succede perché basta essere ubriachi, essersi vomitati addosso, essere poveri, andare in giro negli orari sbagliati e nella parte della città sbagliata


Cartolina di Knoxville degli anni ’50.

La violenza (biblica e non solo) che abita la narrativa di McCarthy compare anche qui, ma in forma ridotta, mitigata, senza calcare, senza indulgenza: ci sono le manganellate delle guardie carcerarie, le botte, le risse, ma fa tutto parte di un quotidiano più mite, come il rancio, come dormire.

McCarthy è nato e cresciuto proprio a Knoxville in Tennessee. E qui ha ambientato i suoi primi romanzi (Il guardiano del frutteto, Il buio fuori, Figlio di Dio, e questo Suttree) e poi l’ultimo The Road).Dopo di che, seguendo il trasloco dello scrittore dal sud est al sud ovest, a dimostrazione che McCarthy scrive solo di luoghi che conosce (molto bene), cambiando geografia sembra cambiare il centro dell’interesse di McCarthy, dalla vita rurale degli Appalachi alle dinamiche della frontiera.



Lo spazio, inteso tanto come entità geografica quanto considerato in relazione alle dinamiche sociali che su questo si instaurano, il posto partecipa allo sviluppo narrativo in tutta i romanzi di McCarthy. Il senso della terra, una terra, delle stagioni che la modificano lasciandola comunque immutabile in quanto si ripetono a ciclo annuale.
E forse perché il romanzo ha, fatto insolito per McCarthy, ambientazione urbana, anziché in mezzo agli Appalachi o al sudovest di frontiera, il mondo che circonda questa umanità è più sporco, marcescente, putrefatto, mucido, fracido, fangoso, puzzolente, in decomposizione, infestato da topi e ratti, di quanto McCarthy mi abbia abituato finora. Sembra difficile muoversi, respirare, mangiare, dormire, vivere senza infettarsi.


Il ponte di Gay Street a Knoxville.

McCarthy non lo esplicita, ma la sensazione è che Suttree stia espiando qualcosa che sente come colpa, forse l’appartenenza a una ricca famiglia di pseudonobiltà del Sud, o forse il fatto d’averla abbandonata. Forse, entrambe le cose. E probabilmente è per questo che spende le sue giornate come fa, tra reietti e pescigatto, tra piccoli criminali del ghetto di Knoxville e lunghe bevute suicide. Una scelta di vita vagamente francescana.
C’è un altro aspetto che lo perseguita: l’essere il sopravvissuto a un parto gemellare. Il fantasma del gemello morto ritorna più volte.
L’espiazione, secondo me, include il viaggio che Suttree intraprende a circa metà del racconto: via dalla civiltà (civiltà) verso la wilderness, via dalla città e su sugli Appalachi.
Verso la conclusione Suttree lotta tra la vita e la morte in un letto d’ospedale per una grave febbre tifoide: sono pagine dedicate alle sue allucinazioni, nelle quali il fratello gemello riappare a personificare la morte in generale. La sua conclusione, la verità finale è che di Suttree ce n’è uno e uno soltanto (there is one Suttree and one Suttree only). Verità che mi viene voglia di affiancare a quest’altra espressa in un altro punto del romanzo:
Credo che gli ultimi e i primi soffrono allo stesso modo perché non è solo nelle tenebre della notte che tutte le anime sono un’anima sola.


La statua di Cornelius Suttree a Knoxville.

Non sono un miscredente. Non far caso a quello che dicono.
No.
Ho sempre pensato che esiste un Dio.
Già.
È solo che non mi è mai piaciuto.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was my first foray into McCarthy, and what a foray it was. The prose hit me with a whallop--so dense and driving, a slow-moving ineluctable train of words that carries the reader to dark and squalid and even funny places as we follow Cornelius Suttree, a privileged son who's given it all up to live as an outcast among outcasts. This is vintage early McCarthy--before All the Pretty Horses made him more popular and, dare I say it?, somewhat less interesting.

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life as infinitely detailed turbid flow. Life’s flow so drenched with death there’s hardly need of another name for it; death as life’s incorporated twin. It’s all a river and it flows. Suttree is saturated with this outlook, this philosophy, though it remains unspoken, instead being simply shown, in a style itself all detail and turbid flow. In fact, the style itself is so integral to the book’s texture and meaning, and the structure of it all so structureless (being modeled on riverflow as it is, words jostled by the very meaning they embody), that it reads almost as an experimental novel, by which I mean only that it is one extended exercise in verbal excessiveness that pushes the form’s limits, and that there’s something simply audacious about it, something almost Fuck off and let me write what the fuck I want about it. Suttree is one of the most engrossing and enriching novels I have ever read, a perfect melding of pure verbal texture and sensual detail culled from actual lived life. It reeks of authenticity. You almost have to scrape each page off your shoes as you flow and roam along with it. And yet the language is so weird at times! So language-centric and partially opaque that the reader’s attention is drawn to the incredible verbal surface only to then discover the incredible human depths contained within unreachable by language. It satisfies the Joycean and the Bukowskian in all of us all stewed together. And while not exactly a moral or ethical guidebook, in that it never speaks its meaning or tries to teach, the humanity embodied by its verbal intricacy is example enough of open-heartedness and compassion for the wayward and down-and-out and downright tragic, for the mass of human dregs always with us, however unnoticed or ignored. But wedded to this open-heartedness and compassion is a detachment – again shown by the very body of the book rather than spoken, heightened by the very language, by the arcane and technical terms so abstract-seeming and detached from the scum and slithering earthiness of the book's depictions – that is a profound lesson in itself, as compassion is often assumed to be measured by how far one is willing to dangerously embroil one’s self in another’s suffering, and not by a heart that radiates outward from relative safety. Not that Cornelius Suttree lives in fear and thus in circumscribed safety, but he lives by his own unspoken code of equality and openness and self-preservation, and so his “safety” is like the safety of a self-sufficient pioneer – anything can happen at any time and he will be prepared for it and the adaptations required, until that one time he’s not and he’s either dead or lost. He understands that we are all alone and so must look out for ourselves, but he also understands that we are all the same and so must look out for each other, though in the end not another soul can save us, or really be there as a substantial presence in our individual unfathomable depths, or at our deaths. An impersonal fluctuating pain and joy-filled compound of profound aloneness and profound community tossed and dunked and driven and sucked up and spewed back out and sucked back in by life’s recirculating turbid flow.

[Lyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Hard weather, says the old man. So let it be. Wrap me in the weathers of the earth, I will be hard and hard. My face will wash rain like the stones. ”

Cormac McCarthy’s unique and distinctive voice in American literature is in rare form in his 1979 Southern Gothic novel about a young man who steps away from a comfortable life with an affluent family to live on the Knoxville riverfront within a populace of drunks and ne’er do wells. Reminiscent of Steinbeck, Faulkner, James Joyce, and Robert Penn Warren but with a fantastic undercurrent like Ray Bradbury; McCarthy’s usually stoic prose is here complex and at times mystical.

“Remember her hair in the morning before it was pinned, black, rampant, savage with loveliness. As if she slept in perpetual storm.”

While the setting and picaresque themes will draw comparisons to Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Tortilla Flat, this is after all McCarthy and his pallet is filled with darker hues. Like Bradbury’s October people, Cormac McCarthy is a resident of the Dusk; a citizen of that time of constant dreary and forlorn harbingers. He is the herald of the doom to come, of the ceaseless reminder of the night to follow.

“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”

But this is also one of his more humorous works (for him) and there was comic relief and drawn as Faulkner did the Snopes, seemingly sprung up blind and ignorant from the hot earth. Gene Harrogate is this source of ironic tomfoolery and his bumpkin misadventures were some of the highlights of this primarily somber work.

One word about Harrogate: watermelons.

McCarthy’s use of symbolism and metaphor was also strongly evident here, as the reader finds ubiquitous references to Christian and Biblical themes. The author also draws on deeper, more atavistic images of pre-Christian Celtic subjects that works well with the mid-century east Tennessee setting.

“What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky worm-bent tabernacle.”

Ultimately it is McCarthy’s great talent, his virtuosity with the written word that makes this a great work and declares its place high on the shelf of American literature.

A book that should be on a short list of modern works that must be read.

[Lori · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my favorite Cormac McCarthy novel so far. It’s a horrifying and funny ramble of the guy’s life. I thought it had some really good vignettes, but a lot of the time I wasn’t interested. I noticed most of the reviews are overwhelmingly positive. I’m not so moved.

There is really not much of a story. The dialogue in dialect is great. The poetic spill of words is incredible. You could draw a bath of them and soak, so long as you’re not too fussy about the cigarette butts and used condoms bobbing around you. Or, your one of those people that enjoy complaining about the trash and debris in your travels.

Aside from a character based on the Goat Man, Charles "Ches" McCartney, (1901?–1998), it did not especially remind me of home. Taken as a whole, I offer a heartfelt ‘Thanks be to God’ for the blessed mercy to me and mine. Maybe, I should have waited for a hell on earth story. I’m already reading two books based in hell, well I suspect one’s purgatory.

No offense to any of the GR reviews, but I liked Jerome Charyn’s 1979 review best. So, I included a link.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17...

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is amazing how McCarthy can find the lyrical beauty in an absurd gout of hallelucinationatory crazy. Absolutely one of my favorite novels of all time (nearly stripped McCarthy's Blood Meridian of its bloody title). Reads like Steinbeck wrote a play based on a David Lynch film about a nightmare child of Fellini and Faulkner that is now worshiped as scripture by pimps, prostitutes, grifters, fishmongers and of course fishermen.

At times Suttree hits me like a complicated musical chorus, a surreal painting, and a ballet of misfits and grotesques, all chopped up and swirling in a dirty river's refuse. I won't look at a summer watermelon with the same degree of innocence again.

[William2 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cormac McCarthy is a connoisseur of words and the rhythms of speech. I can't think of anyone who writes like McCarthy (who recently died). He needs an indulgent reader, someone who is willing to give him free reign. Here's a quote.

"He lived for another five hours and died sometime before daybreak unattended. They hadnt even taken off his shoes. Charlie had gone home and Suttree and the mother sat in the little waiting room. When the doctor came out and told them he was dead Billy Ray's mother began to cry very quietly. She sat there with her chin quivering and she shook her head slowly from side to side over her dead warrior. Suttree touched her shoulder but she waved him away and she did not look up.

"He walked out of the hospital and across the wet grass toward the road. Very slowly the lights of the city were going out, the billboards, the streetlamps. He crossed the river by the high iron bridge, past the orchards in the dark, lights in the water upstream and the sky paling and the night and its disciplines draining away leaving the barren trees as lack as iron and a paper city rising in the dawn. A great stillness had fallen. He walked through the dead gray streets. A newspedlar was opening his bale of papers at the corner. The streetsweepers had passed and in the black gutterwater the lights from the polelamps lay like pietins among the darker neon bleedings." (p. 377)

Suttree's friend has just died. How does McCarthy show grief, as opposed to merely saying there was grief? Please reread the second quoted paragraph.

There is no plot; the characters drive the story, poor people living on the river in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the nineteen-fifties. All speak with this strangely articulate low-brow vocabulary: ex-cons, drinkers of moonshine, small-time crooks, broken and living on pennies.

There is a kindness among the abysmally poor river folk that is often moving. Suttree's nature is both generous and profligate. The book at times serves up outrageous dark humor, but this is offset by filth and decay and poor hygiene and death. The book is not, as some have written, a comedy. It is its own signature kind of pungent literary fiction.

Scenes that will set your hair on fire include: "part-time-catamite" Leonard's implication of Suttree in a plan to dispose of his father, dead six-months, so his mother can keep receiving the old man's welfare; the lethal bar fight in which Suttree is brained with a floorbuffer; the meeting with the old black witch whose prophesy Suttree declines to hear and, it could be argued, bolts town to avoid; his aimless wandering in the hills above Gatlinburg, all macabre delusion; and, after heavy rain, a murderous mudslide.

I remember V.S. Naipaul in an interview extolling the virtues of the simpler word. Of course, he was right. It was McCarthy's wish however to break with that esthetic standard as often as he could — somehow it works, but I couldn't say how. My pleasure in the writing at times verges on the ecstatic.

I gladly recommend this novel and — in no particular order — The Crossing, The Passenger, Cities of the Plain, All the Pretty Horses, The Road, and Blood Meridian.

[Lawyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Suttree: Cormac McCarthy's Conclusion to a Southern Quartet

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy was chosen as a group read by members of On the Southern Literary Trail in May, 2012 and August, 2019.

Suttree was published February 1, 1979.



First Edition

On the dust jacket Cormac McCarthy appears a young man.



McCarthy's first novel, The Orchard Keeper was published in 1965. Sources clearly indicate that Suttree was already a work in progress. Jerome Charyn reviewed Suttree for the New York Times and said that McCarthy actually wrote Suttree over a thirty year span. I wouldn't argue. It's just that good. It's just that perfect.

Cornelius Suttree is the son of a wealthy and privileged family. He turns his back on an easy life style and becomes a regular roamer among the outcasts and misfits of Memphis Society in the McAnally Community down by the Tennessee River.



McAnally Community

Suttree lives in a small shanty house boat below McAnally.



In the background stands the Gay Bridge, where Suttree views the recovery of a suicide at the beginning of the story.

Suttree readily takes to the life of a river rat. He runs trotlines, selling the carp and catfish on his hooks at the market and other customers on his regular route through McAnally.



Running a trotline

Although Suttree is the central voice in the novel, Suttree is surrounded by a numerous crowd of characters reminiscent of Steinbeck's inhabitants of Cannery Row. The dialog is lean, each word ringing true.

Suttree is a novel to be savored and read carefully. Time shifts throughout the novel. Flashbacks abound. Other action occurs in the present. A careful reading indicates that Suttree looks back on his past life in Knoxville, having moved on. However, Suttree is a novel that becomes a seamless read, endlessly engrossing, and completely fascinating.

Knoxville and the river become as significant characters as the men and women who live in town and on the river. McCarthy's brings life on the river alive. You can hear it, smell it, feel it.

Suttree is a constant puzzle. McCarthy never reveals the reason for his separation from his family. However, Suttree served time in a Tennessee Workhouse, a lesser security level of the Tennessee Penitentiary system for an attempted pharmacy robbery. Whether Suttree's family banished him, or Suttree chose to save his family's is never clearly revealed.

Nor is Suttree a stranger to love. He was married and had a son. That he remembered his wife's hair, black, spread across the pillow, storm blown, after they had shared their marriage bed clearly indicate that he did not deliberately seek the life of a loner. Once again, his abandonment of his wife and child is left unclear.

Reading Suttree is enough to make you believe Mark Twain has returned from the dead and written the later years of Huck Finn's life, unhindered by the social conventions that Twain pressed but did not cross excessively in his own life time.

While many McCarthy readers and reviewers consistently point to Blood Meridian as his greatest work, I'll choose, Suttree. Highly recommended. This is SIX STARS.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not since I first read Tom Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel have I encountered anyone who could write prose that rings so much like poetry or song lyric as Cormac McCarthy. If I were rating just the opening section of this book, it would get 5-stars, hands down. To say McCarthy conjures up other great writers is an understatement, for in addition to Wolfe, I immediately thought of Walt Whitman and the earthy descriptions in Song of Myself. Finally, as other readers have so often remarked, he channels Faulkner in many ways as well, in both style, content, and his understanding of what transpires beneath the skin of human beings.

That Cormac McCarthy awakens memories of other writers is certainly not to say he is a derivative of anyone else. Ah, no, he is uniquely himself and his writing, while perhaps informed by these great pens, stands separate and apart from them, admitting him to their ranks rather than adding him to their imitators. With a grit that is uniquely his own, he shuns the pretty and simple, and goes with fury for the sordid and complex.

Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled doors no soul shall walk save you.

And there we are, alone in a street with the night people and prowling cats, with dirt and soot and all that is unsavory and smelly, sweaty with the steam the early morning water trucks have left behind, and we know this trip might be frightening but it is sure to be enlightening.

If you have ever walked a city street and turned your head to avoid looking at the homeless sleeping in a park, or if you have crinkled your nose because you have ventured into an area where people are as likely to piss on a street corner as seek a toilet, or if you have felt a little tingle of fear on your spine when traveling through a section of a city that you know is prone to drive-by shootings, you will recognize the Knoxville of this book. You may be afraid, but Cormac McCarthy is not afraid. He explores the thin line between the educated and privileged life and that of the uneducated and poverty-stricken and he never flinches even the tiniest bit. He finds the drunken slovenliness, but he also finds the humanity, kindness, and humor. He knocks down every stereotype and hands you a person.

I had a friend who was prone to say, when things went wrong, “life’s a bitch and then you die.” That might well describe the world of Suttree, but it would leave out all the living that is done between the bitchiness and the death, and those moments of friendship and concern might be what the living is really all about. Because in the midst of it all, there are moments of transcendence:

He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt’s blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this novel McCarthy abandons his usual formula. Instead of initially creating a close relationship of innocence and leading it into perils here he gives us a solitary itinerant character who, upon release from prison, sets up home in a shack by the Mississippi River. The novel follows the somewhat aimless trials and tribulations of Cornelius Suttree. Suttree is McCarthy's most self-indulgent novel. In all his novels he occasionally juxtaposes his minimalistic sentence writing with complex high-flying lyrical outbursts, a tendency I never much liked but could ignore. Here the lyrical outbursts are much more frequent and impossible to ignore. It's as if he sets himself the challenge of incorporating a few thoroughly obscure and heavyweighted words into a sentence. Like this -

"One spring morning timing the lean near-liquid progress of a horse on a track, the dust exploding, the rapid hasping of his hocks, coming up the straight foreshortened and awobble and passing elongate and birdlike wish harsh breaths and slatted brisket heaving and the muscles sliding and brunching in clocklike flexion under the wet black hide and a gout of foam hung from the long jaw and then gone in a muted hoofclatter, the aging magistrate snapped his thumb from the keep of the stopwatch he held and palmed it into his waistcoat pocket and looking at nothing, nor child nor horse, said anent that simple comparison of rotary motions and in the oratory to which he was prone that they had witnessed a thing against which time would not prevail."

This kind of sentence writing reminds me of someone sowing heavy glittering jewels into the fabric of a kite. Might look impressive but the overloaded kite will never get off the ground. There are some awesomely brilliant scenes in this novel but overall the aimlessness of Suttree himself infected the narrative drive for me and it was also too loose-limbed and pretentious for me to warm to.

[Chris Via]

While I think that Blood Meridian is his most important book, I believe that Suttree is his best book.

Review on Leaf by Leaf: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0b-5...

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

No one in the world can write like McCarthy. The power of his sentences comes not from ease and lightness and polish - they are hard and angular like a sculpted figure whittled laboriously from a gnarled hunk of wood, rendered the more striking for the humble matter from which it was hewn. The prose is wild and inscrutable, awash with metaphor and arcane vocabulary and curiouslyformed compoundwords to confound the reader - the purpose seems to be to locate the limit of language and extract from it every available quantum of substance.

There is no neat little story, no tidy character arc. Like all McCarthy's novels, Suttree is an attempt to make sense of the anguish and absurdity of a life lived within the crucible of an indifferent universe, where redemption is nonexistent and slow entropic decay is the natural order of things.

[Melki · Rating 5 out of 5]

A man spends a few years of his life living on the river; years that are filled with catfish and carp, sex and death, vile bodies, and viler bodily fluids. Coffee-colored and seething, the river waits, always in the background, vying for billing as protagonist.

He could hear the river talking softly beneath him, heavy old river with wrinkled face.

The book is filled with adventures in drunken debauchery and foiled get-rich-quick schemes. And always, always, there is some heinous concoction to cloud the mind and warm the belly.

Suttree took the bottle and twirled off the little fluted plastic cap and hooked a good snot of it back.
Smoke rose from his noseholes.

This is not a pretty book. There is nothing uplifting, though sly humor creeps through, sometimes when least expected.
Mostly it is a slimy, humid, unpleasant trudge through the mire.

But, damn! It's a good one!

Did you ever know anybody to be so bad about luck?
Suttree said he had. He said that things would get better.
The old man shook his head doubtfully, paying the band of his cap through his fingers. I'm satisfied they cain't get no worse, he said.
But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didn't say so.

See? A big, blood and guts book, gleaming like fresh roadkill in the gutter.

And I mean that in the best possible way.

[Teresa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Before starting Suttree, I’d heard it was a retelling of The Odyssey and even if I hadn’t, I would have sensed it, especially in one particular section. But Suttree is even more episodic than the original and doesn’t have one overarching story of the protagonist trying to get back home. Instead, Suttree makes his way back to his houseboat several times after leaving it for various reasons, as if he is Sisyphus—doomed to push the same boulder up the same hill.

Most of his reasons for leaving his boat are understandable—death of a relative; the promise of work—but one sojourn to the mountains of Gatlinburg in the depths of winter seems to have no reason and that’s when I wondered if perhaps Suttree is schizophrenic and/or that he takes off when his thoughts become too much for him. That latter impression was reinforced at another juncture when he contemplates the stars and is grateful for a respite when they are clouded.

The story is set in the early-1950s Knoxville area among outcasts living on the outskirts. Brutal vernacular is of the time and police brutality is an ever-present danger. The depiction of a young woman Suttree has a sexual relationship with for a time bothered me for certain reasons, though I understand its purpose. The character of Harrogate, a clueless young man Suttree met in prison, and his over-the-top mishaps are comic genius.

McCarthy’s language is the star of the show. Without it, I wouldn’t have cared for reading about drunks, fights, and debaucheries. At times the grotesque and even gross imagery turns poetic and beautiful; many times it fittingly remains gross. The book’s final death has me thinking more than its plot-point probably warrants and I have my own interpretation of the ending, though it contradicts the events of the final pages, which are beautifully written, especially the last two paragraphs.

I’d previously read only McCarthy’s The Road. I’ve heard that once you read either Suttree and/or Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West, you’ll fall into either the Camp-of-Love or the Camp-of-Not-for-Me. And if you fell into the former, you’d want to read more of him. Once again, I feel contradictory (I don’t believe in absolutes), because I might read more of him, but I could also see myself thinking this is enough.

[Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤ · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Seems like when the shit hits the fan they all clear out. Even the goddamn cat."

There are those books that make you feel all light and happy and squiggly inside. They're so full of positivity that you can't help but smile and feel better about everything.

Suttree is not that kind of book. I don't think Cormac McCarthy knows how to write those kinds of books. His shit is bleak. It drags you into the pit of despair along with his miserable characters. And yet you can't help but be sucked into the story, to almost want to be dragged down with them.

The characters in Suttree never seem to catch a break. They are mired in poverty with little hope of ever rising above their circumstances. Suttree lives in a disintegrating houseboat, making a meager living from fishing.

His friends are in no better shape. They are despondent and often resort to crime in order to make ends meet. They are even worse off because, unlike Suttree, they didn't choose this life. Suttree came from privilege but we never learn why he gave it up and came to live among the crazed and impoverished.

No matter what happens or what terrible things he witnesses, Suttree remains strangely detached. He takes things in stride and he never judges those who resort to crime.

I'm not sure what it is about McCarthy's writing that is so compelling. This wasn't an enjoyable book to read. And yet.... and yet I didn't not want to read it. I almost felt like I had to, after reading the first few pages. This is the second book of his that has done that to me and it must be part of his genius.

3.5 stars rounded up.

"What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh."

[Dmitry Berkut · Rating 5 out of 5]

How much I love Suttree — its density, with a bitter touch of humor and unrelenting bleakness. I used to think that Blood Meridian was the pinnacle of Cormac McCarthy’s work, but now I see that Suttree is something truly special, and, in some ways, Meridian grew out of it. There’s this sense of otherworldly, Old Testament loneliness that permeates the novel from start to finish.

McCarthy explores themes of death, guilt, family ties, and the futility of existence, all through rich symbolism and philosophical musings about life on society's fringes. The novel evokes an existential dread in an atmosphere of meditative reflection, where time seems to stretch, and the river becomes a symbol of the relentless flow of life.

This is an epic yet intimate work about the search for meaning in a world devoid of simple answers. Its dark beauty and complexity are impossible to ignore. Suttree isn’t just a novel; it’s a profound dive into the human soul, full of contradictions, pain, and glimpses of humor that make the bleakness even more palpable.

[Edward Gwynne · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tragic, hilarious, powerful and meandering, rambling journey of a man's life. At times poignant, other times bizarre, I loved it.

Here is much of McCarthy's best writing. The human's are more human, the landscapes are almost tangible and the dialogue is his best yet. I can't wait to read it again already.

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite the slow burn. Most of Mccarthy's other works are very plot-driven, and you see that really reinforced in his western novels where you have this incredibly hypnotic language coalescing with (often horrific) events to create this sort of magisterial whirlwind of doom which just pulls you in with it's richness. That sort of building up takes a back burner here in favor of something which just sort of flows out in all directions, trying to encompass totally the world of the downtrodden and dispossessed in and around Knoxville, circa, 1951. Mccarthy assembles this incredible rogues gallery of outcasts and we just sort of follow them around, watching them drink, fight, fuck, and in general just shyst their way through life. And yet we always return to Cornelius Suttree, an odd and supremely lonely man, as he stumbles through life, moving between these almost Huckleberry Finnesque moments of humor and surprising tenderness, and these really gothic moments of isolation and loss.
Unlike say Blood Meridian or All the Pretty Horses, I found that this took a few days to really work its way into my head. But once it did, I actually kind of wanted the stunning descriptions of floating river trash and burnt out industrial parks to just keep going on. If you've ever felt degenerate, or shiftless or lonely, you'll probably find that Suttree resonates, albeit slowly.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whilst I wasn't blown away as much by McCarthy's prose here like I was in Blood Meridian, Suttree is still one heck of a novel. The novel opens on the Tennessee River in the early 50s, and McCarthy goes on to paint a tough and vivid portrait where he shows little mercy to his characters; from prostitutes and gamblers, to junkmen and drunkards, as poverty rains down like hellfire. Cornelius Suttree's misadventures, all the wretchedness they are soaked in, and the vocabulary that took some getting used to, resulted in a powerhouse of a narrative, that still managed to infuse moments of illuminating beauty in all that unabated squalor.

It's like a Doom-mongering Huckleberry Finn; a monstrous flood that bruises and batters its readers. It's a bleak book yes; a hard-hitting Southern piece of fiction that makes you want to take a shower, and that has a story that likes to meander, but it did produce a few laughs; most prominently and memorably being when the 'moonlight melonmounter' is mentioned - that being Suttree's friend, Gene, who got caught in a farmer's field shagging a pulpy fruit and sent to the work farm. I much preferred this to anything by the likes of Faulkner or O'Connor as it simply got its hooks into me and wouldn't let go. 4.5/5

[Perry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cormac McCarthy at his best--..writing with the throttle wide open--is still the closest thing to heroin you can buy in a bookstore. --Hal Crowther
A Smoky Mountain High: Trudging through Smokies with Loquacious, Abstruse McCarthy

Haled by cognoscenti, this early Cormac McCarthy tale follows the travails of Cornelius Suttree, a wayward, educated and privileged itinerant, as he wanders through the backwoods and over the rivers and streams of the Smoky Mountains, his acquaintances with the hillbillies, bums, misfits, miscreants and poverty-stricken, and his rotten, even tragic, relationships with honeys from the hinterland.

This novel was, as are all other McCarthy novels I've read except All the Pretty Horses, filled with long stretches so verbose and packed with punishing esoteric descriptions and arcane allusions that it took away the flow of the story.

Samples I was able to quickly pull:

Where hunters and woodcutters once slept in their boots by the dying light of their thousand fires and went on, old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate Semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parable therein...

...Gray vines coiled leftward in this northern hemisphere, what winds them shapes the dogwhelk's shell. ... A dim world receded above his upturned toes, shapes of skewed shacks erupted bluely in the niggard lamplight. ... Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan ink wash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea. ... As he rocks in his rusty pannier to the sea's floor in a drifting stain of guano.

... Bechrismed with scented oils he lay boneless in a cold euphoria.

I wish I could be intelligent enough to understand, much less comprehend, all this on a quick read.

Cabalistic, pleonastic and recondite issues aside ;-), this simply was not nearly as memorable or enjoyable as Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses and No Country for Old Men.


*Modified Benjamin Disraeli's 1878 pan of Gladstone.

[Lane Wilkinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Suttree' goes directly into my own, personal daydream of the idealized 20th century canon. The heavily stylized prose hearkens back to the works of Joyce, Steinbeck, Algren, Faulkner, and Celine. Indeed, I have yet to encounter another book that so perfectly synthesizes these five unique voices of 20th century literature

'Suttree', at heart, is a sort of urban pastoral, replete with the myriad voices of a depressed, post-war Knoxville. Cornelius Suttree's wanderings echo precisely the tourist-guide to Dublin that is found in 'Ulysses'. From the bottle-broken industry fields of the riverfront to the Dickensian squalor of McAnally Flats, every inch of pavement in downtown Knoxville is meticulously cataloged and populated with all manner of tramps, lowlifes, and assorted miscreants.

This tour of the destitute is peppered with the strange vernacular of the streets, a sort of Southern-drawl meets drunken brusque. Dialogues rise and fall with a natural cadence that is absolutely mesmerizing.

In particular, I was struck by the amazing brevity with which some events unfolded. Though many pages might be spent on arguably mundane details of fishing, socializing, or even decorating basement rentals (albeit, in beautiful prose), life-changing events such as the deaths of lovers, the deterioration of relationships, and the dire consequences of drunken brawls sometimes appear within the space of one or two paragraphs. Characters are killed and forgotten in a single sentence, which only adds to the narrative, insofar as Suttree, at heart, is a man who has given up. Love, death, and squalor make no impression on Suttree, and he becomes a sort of infinitely malleable and sadly detached figure. Where a night if drinking and screwing occupies twenty pages, the death of a friend in a barfight later that night only warrants a single paragraph. This sort of terse approach makes 'Suttree' read as a psychological survey of despondency.

Yet, Suttree is admirable in his insouciance. His ineffable lack of concern for the crumbling world around him gives him a strength that is lacking in all of the other characters. It seems not so much that Suttree has given up on life, rather, he seems to have adopted the infinite resignation of some existential sage.

[Jessaka · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and haunting prose. Lyrical.

McCartney has been compared to Faulkner, BukowskI, and John Steinbeck’s “Cannery Row.“ I have read Faulkner and Bukowski, and once was more than enough. But I can’t get enough of McCarthy at the moment. So, I can only understand a little of what they are saying in regards to the first two writers. Comparisons to John Steinbeck, yes. I see the resemblance, but I loved Steinbeck‘s characters. I don‘t always like McCarthy’s.

So why read McCarthy if his characters are not so loving? Well, it’s his lyrical prose. It keeps drawing me to his books even though they are often train wrecks, and even though they can be savage, cruel, vicious, ferocious, murderous, ruthless, and callous--all those words that are synonyms for brutal.

But McCarthy can also make you feel for his characters, such as he did with Suttree, who I realized was not such a bad guy after all. He really cared about his friends, and he even helped them, even saved them when needed.

Suttree had deserted his wife and son, but the book won’t say why. And when his son died, he was blamed for his death. You won’t know why about this either. So Suttreee had to sneak into the graveyard when his son was being buried. He stood off to the side where he wouldn’t be seen by his ex-wife and watched. It was then that I received the first sense of his humanity:

“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread…He sat in the dappled light among the stones. A bird sang. Some leaves were falling. He sat with his palm up on the grass beside him like a stricken puppet. He thought no thoughts at all…Suttree stood by a tree but no one noticed him. The preacher had begun. Suttree heard no word of what he said until his own name was spoken. Then everything became quite clear. He turned and laid his head against the tree, choked with a sorrow he had never know.”

I don’t consider Faulkner or Bukowski to be a genesis with words. McCarthy is. When I read his books I can see everything in my mind’s eye. It is as if I am seeing for the first time. His description of gutting a fish was amazing. Who has ever seen every moment in the gutting of a fish or every moment that happens in any scene in life? McCarthy gives you these moments.

I wonder how much of this book McCarthy had actually experienced? He once said in an interview: if you want to know me read my books. He also said that he never wanted to work. Suttree. But McCarthy does work, it took him 20 years or so to write this book. Perhaps he doesn’t call it work. But what he did with this book over the twenty years is, he created a masterpiece.

In an interview he also said:

"There's no such thing as life without bloodshed, The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous."

JESUS WEPT.

So what is this story about that makes it so good? There is no story. Just days and years in the life of Suttree who lives on a riverboat and had friends who were downtrodden and often derelict, friends that have many misadventures. It’s the lyrical prose that made it so good. Prose unlike no other writer. And near the end of the story the prose progressed more into darkness, so much so that I felt that something really bad was going to happen, and I didn’t want to find out what.


“Scarlet trumpets of cowitch overhung the little house and wildflowers bloomed up through the twisted shapes of steel by whatever miracle renders grease and cincers arable and the junkman’s lot was a garden more lovely for the phantasm from which it sprang. Harrogate paused at the fence and leaned his hood there. He pushed open the weighted gate, starting a hummingibr from the flowers in the dooryard. Rainwater still dripped from the tarpaper eaves and it lay in bright pools and slashes on the gray and steaming backs of the auots where they reared above the grass and fronds like feeding bovines. He rapped at the open door. The cane at the corner of the shack rattled genelty in the wind. Everything lay quiet and sun dabbled in his quaint garden by the river.”

“What could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.”

“He dreamt that night that he rode through the woods on a low ridge. Below him he could see deer in a meadow where the sun fell on the grass. The grass was still wet and the deer stood in it to their elbows. He could feel the spine of the mule rolling under him and he gripped the mule's barrel with his legs. Each leaf that brushed his face deepened his sadness and dread. Each leaf he passed, he'd never pass again. They rode over his face like veils, already some yellow, their veins slender like bones where the sun shone through them. He had resolved himself to ride on for he could not turn back and the world that day was as lovely as any day ever was and he was riding to his death.”


Suttree's home

[Diane Barnes · Rating 4 out of 5]

To paraphrase Jerry Garcia: What a long strange trip this book has been. Most of it takes place on the waterfront of Knoxville, Tennessee, circa early 1950's. Suttree is a "river rat", living in a derelict houseboat and making his living as a fisherman, cavorting with down and out members of the Knoxville underworld. The difference between them and Suttree is that he was born into a privileged family and has chosen this life. We never find out why, and are only given a few hints of his previous life. What we do know is that he is smarter than his cronies, and they look to him for advice and help, which he gives even when he knows it will lead nowhere.
That's it for plot, there really isn't one. This is a series of scenes and incidents, and some of the tales are masterpieces of humor. Gene Harrogate is possibly the stupidest man/boy in the annals of literature, and every scene with him promises laughs, inter-laced with sadness. McCarthy does that very well in this book: even as you're laughing, you can see the tragedy of these lives.

Some reviewers see traces here of Huckleberry Finn and Steinbeck's cast of characters in "Cannery Row" and "Tortilla Flats". I saw that too, but can also see that Suttree contains traces of fictional characters who came later, namely Cool Hand Luke and Sully from the pages of Richard Russo's "Nobody's Fool." The men who never fit in, but just want to live their own version of a good life. Lonely drifters that cause envy in the rest of us, because they dare to march to their own beat, and tell the rest of the world to go to Hell.

I've been reading a lot of McCarthy lately, and this one is different. Violence, yes, inhumanity, yes, but humor and friendship and compassion in people who have little else. Wonderful novel that I will read again.

[Mike R.W. · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Cormac McCarthy. While Suttree was certainly not a let down, it did feel like there was a distance or surrealness to the characters and story. Speaking of story, there really isn't much there. The people are this book's story.

The book is written in mostly a deep southern slang. We've all strumbled upon a book without quotation marks (Saramego!) or maybe some unique spacing or syntax. A couple of times I had to backpeddle north on the page to confirm which character was speaking. Though this may sound awkward, it was a part of this world that Cormac created.

The book had a vibe and it was consistent. It was like being underwater. The reading experience had a steady feeling of dreariness. Mr. McCarthy can easily paint pictures in your head, and the pictures from Suttree were all in gray. The people don't have clear features, even up close. At a distance they're just a streaky, gray blur. In closer scenes, like inside Suttree's houseboat, I imagine the lighting would call for shadows and dark hues. It’s really the vibe of this world, this surrealness that Cormac created, that paints these dreary pictures.

Much respect to Mr. McCarthy for creating such a unique novel. It's not the first time he's absolutely slayed it! Good for him. It could be used as evidence in court for one of the reasons Cormac has such a diverse portfolio of brilliantness.

[Blair · Rating 5 out of 5]

'Suttree', Cormac McCarthy's 1979 Southern Gothic, semi-autobiographical novel was written over a twenty year span. Set in 1951 Knoxville, Cornelius Suttree, or 'Sut', has abandoned his wife and son and a life of privilege in favor of a life of squalor in a rundown houseboat on the Tennessee River.
Considered by many to be McCarthy's masterpiece, it is an extraordinary study of a fragmented man and the ragtag medley of drunkards, lowlifes, squatters, hookers, and ne'er-do-wells whose lives intersect with his.
With masterstrokes and a hefty thesaurus, McCarthy expertly sets the mood and tone of a dark, desperate wasteland of humanity along the river. One writer described it as a 'Tom Sawyer for the damned'
One gets the sense that with McCarthy's later works, that he held back and made them more accessible for a wider appeal, but with 'Suttree', he had not pulled any punches- this is the author in all his literary glory, with rich, vivid imagery, dark humour and beautiful poetic prose.
This is a master at the top of his game.

[Tom Stewart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Get ye a tater.

A fourth reread. Barring Shakespeare, name me a source richer in exquisite prose. I’m listening. Even Blood Meridian trails. It’s in my top three favourite books of all time.

“I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.”

Appraise a writer by how slow you read him. If I read Suttree any slower I’d be going backwards. Then again, I do turn the pages back some times and this is a reread.

Stunning writing and I couldn’t care less that it lacks a plot. His editor pleaded with him to tighten the manuscript and damn I’m glad he stuck to his guns. My only literary metric: move me. Nothing else matters. Editors are great but they instill bad habits. In Suttree McCarthy captures his version of McAnally Flats, Tennessee.

Descriptive genius. A master in his own class. A book with many types of subtle perfection. How close, how slow are you willing to read it?

“I ain’t no infidel. Don’t pay no mind to what they say.”
“No.”
“I always figured they was a God.”
“Yes.”
“I just never did like him.”

“He could see the old man on the bridge, or rather he could see the faintest figure disturb the globes of light one by one slowly until the farther dark had taken him.”

Good writing starts with extreme attention to detail at the descriptive level, then out to individual human emotion and dynamics, and finally a broadening collage of papered humanity. McCarthy is a master of it all. I read him to progress as a writer, to explore humanity, to be inspired, to be moved, to see just what literary art is capable of.

I’m not searching for repetition and similarities but given I constantly reread CM (and EH), I happen to note some:

The familiars. Very interesting to see earlier references to the familiars, those apparitions (or metaphysically uncertain entities) that will haunt Alicia in Stella Maris. “He himself used to wake in terror to find whole congregations of the uninvited attending his bed, protean figures slouched among the room’s dark corners in all multiplicity of shapes [.]”

Through lines in CM’s body of work, the prevailing darkness, the hoards on the fringes on society, lonely protagonists. But also humanity, moments of light and beauty.

I’m curious if similarities like this among novels are intentional:

In Suttree: “[...] how the lilies leaned in the hall glass and a door closed and the candleflames trembled and righted again [...]”

In All the Pretty Horses: “The candleflame and the image of the candleflame caught in the pier glass twisted and righted when he entered the hall [...] In the dark glass where the lilies leaned so palely from their waisted cutglass vase.”

"He squatted and watched the flame totter. The dank stone room grew smaller, drew in about him. He crouched in the smallest cup of light with his hands joined at the back of the flame as if he would gather it to him. Hot oil ran on the stone. The wick toppled and dropped with a thin hiss and dark closed over him so absolute that he became without boundary to himself, as large as all the universe and small as anything that was."

“Suttree knelt in the sand and skipped a stone. A curving track of ringshapes. The far shore lay deeply shadowed. The siltbars delicately sutured with the tracks of wharfrats. She had knelt beside him and nibbled his ear. Her soft breast against his arm. Why then this loneliness?” CM doesn’t write a lot of interiority. It stands out when he employs it.

Suttree visiting the asylum reads very much like Bobby Western doing so in The Passenger. And its there we see the name Alice, just like in Stella Maris. That scene is utterly haunting. Subtle but perfect touches make it tragically vivid. Whether or not that scene exists in life, for certain its sentiments do. That's why it's so sad. I’ve read and reread it and will continue to.

***

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[Cosimo]

Dove i vivi e i morti sono una cosa sola

“In piedi tra le foglie urlanti Suttree invocava il fulmine. Che scoppiò e tuonò e lui indicò il proprio cuore ottenebrato e lo supplicò per un po' di luce. Sennò riduci queste ossa in cenere. Si sedette contro un albero e guardò il temporale spostarsi sopra la città. Sono forse un mostro, ci sono dei mostri dentro di me?”

Sul silenzioso fiume Tennessee, Suttree è un naufrago che diserta la vita, un profugo in fuga dalla quiete di una esistenza programmata, che in un lungo viaggio dietro agli occhi bendati della notte oltrepassa il tempo per unirsi definitivamente a quelli che sono stati, agli amici diseredati e disperati, che vivono dell'ebbrezza e del tuono. C'è una breve scena con Suttree ubriaco in Chiesa che ricorda il suo passato e parla con il prete: una anticipazione piena di grazia e mistero del girovagare profetico della sua anima nella seconda metà del romanzo. Quando trova l'amore, la natura si oppone; non ci si può ribellare alla sventura, bisogna cedere alla potenza degli elementi. Quando costruisce il benessere, tutto svanisce, ogni verità annega nella follia. Il racconto inizia e finisce con un cadavere sconosciuto. Un suicida si getta nel fiume, il corpo di un vagabondo giace nel letto di Suttree. Tra ubriacature e risse, la violenza e la miseria trascinano via le esistenze dei suoi compagni, senza compromessi né incantesimi, in un'allucinazione che non perdona. Ossessionato dalla morte del gemello e orfano di un figlio, Suttree lascia la casa galleggiante e si rimette in viaggio, disilluso superstite che non si può più arrendere. Muovendosi tra Vicolo Cannery e Huckleberry Finn, McCarthy incarna la voce nomade e sotterranea della letteratura, che coinvolge tutto e interamente, e costruisce la sua odissea onirica e oltremondana; percorso da un daìmon metafisico e attratto da una mitologia dell'umiltà, evoca il destino di vagabondi, ladri, derelitti, paria, balordi, giocatori, ruffiani, sgualdrine e streghe in un canto epico e doloroso che si perde in un cielo di cenere.

“Un suo doppio, un controsuttree in quei boschi lo stava evitando e Suttree temeva che se la figura non si fosse alzata e dileguata costringendolo quindi di fronte a se stesso in quella foresta oscura non si sarebbe mai più ripreso né avrebbe ritrovato il senno e anzi avrebbe brancolato immemore e farneticante appresso a quel fantomatico clone, di sole in sole e per sempre attraverso un emisfero ostile”.