Mr. James’s Reviews > Suttree > Status Update

How the snow fell cherry red in the soft neon flush of the beersign like the slow dropping of blood. [...] Blind Richard sits with his wife. The junkman drunk, his mouth working mutely and his neck awry like a hanged man's. A young homosexual alone in the corner crying. Suttree among others, sad children of the fates whose home is the world, all gathered here a little while to forestall the going there. -- C.M.

Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this. The thousand brawls and stoven jaws, the clubbings and the broken bottles and the little knives that come from nowhere. For him perhaps it all was done in silence, or how would it sound, the shot that fired the bullet that lay already in his brain? These small enigmas of time and space and death. -- C.M.

When I die he's goin to come to sleep with me. We're to be buried together. It's done arranged. It is. [...] What if the dog dies first? What? I said what if the dog dies first? [...] I mean if the dog dies first are they going to put you to sleep? Why hell no that's crazy. I guess maybe you could just have him frozen. [...] The old man hugged the crazy looking thing to him. Of course I could, he said. -- C.M

We're all right, said Suttree. We're all fucked, said the ragman. [...] He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in me? -- C.M.

They squatted on their haunches side by side like buzzards and smiled around. Suttree looked at them. He looked at one and then he looked at the other. They were alike to the crooks in their stained brown teeth. The creases about their eyes, the quilting of their dry bird necks. They squatted there and bobbed their heads and smiled and spat at the fire and said howdy howdy. -- C.M.

These lovers lay crumpled in the dripping wood and listened to the fall of the rain heart on heart. Her wet hair lay across his face like black seaweed. She said his name. He moved as if to rise but she held him. You'll catch cold, he said. I dont care. -- C.M.

... Suttree had found a stack of moldering books and he read through them one by one without regard. [...] He read Tom Swift and His Motorcycle and he read The Black Brotherhood and he read Mildred at Home. There were about a dozen titles and when he had finished them all he started over again. She read Mildred at Home and a story about nurses. She said that she would like to be a nurse. -- C.M.

A frailly structured matriarchy showed itself in these latter days, and Suttree reckoned it had always been so. Crouched there under the ledge in the wind's lee while the flames of the small fire lapped back the dark and all around and ceaseless fell the rain in the forest they could have been some band of stone age folk washed up out of an atavistic dream. -- C.M.

At night she watched him with eyes full of questions. All were brought into such close and constant communion by the rain that the configuration of the family seemed to alter. -- C.M.

He lay down in his blankets. It was growing dark, long late midsummer twilight in the woods. He wanted to go down to the river to bathe but he felt too bad. He turned over and looked at the small plot of ground in the crook of his arm. My life is ghastly, he told the grass. -- C.M.