Mr. James’s Reviews > Suttree > Status Update

Her ablutions were endless. In her bright metal haircurlers she looked like the subject of bizarre experiments upon the human brain. And she was growing fatter. She said: How'd you like to live in a whorehouse? You'd eat too. -- C.M.

He had been shot through the head with a .32 caliber pistol and he was twenty-one years old forever. -- C.M.

He crossed the cold buckled linoleum with puckered feet and stood naked by the window and watched the Monday morning traffic in the streets below. A different slant on life here. Old whiskey bottles with their bleached labels lying on the wet tar of the rooftops. A glass skylight covered with chickenwire. The cold winter rain failing everywhere over the city. -- C.M.

Suttree gradually going awash 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 like the very witch of fuck. -- C.M.

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.