Detail
Title: Suttree ISBN: 9780679736325Published May 1992 by Vintage International (first published May 1st 1979) · Paperback 471 pages
Genre: Fiction, Gothic, Southern Gothic, Literature, Novels, Classics, American, Southern, Literary Fiction, Contemporary
Must be read
User Reviews
Jeffrey Keeten
"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
I also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
karen
like faulkner, except good...
Michael
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
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.
Lori
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...
Luís
I am helpless to talk about this book. There are a lot of words that I did not understand. Suttree, from Cormac, is a book that deserves, much like 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 its 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.
From time to time, there are chance meetings, beautiful cars, rotten rooms at $ 5 a week when the winter is too harsh and the river freezes. There are little coffee tricks, the cola watered with whiskey adulterated, the grocery stove around this court of miracles.
I could say again and again that this novel is rich, beautiful and superbly written. Cormac is a genius.
Lawyer
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.
Darwin8u
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.
Sara (taking a break)
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
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.
Edward
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.
Jenna ❤ ❀ ❤
"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."
Melki
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.
Perry
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...I wish I could be intelligent enough to understand, much less comprehend, all this on a quick read.
...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.
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.
J
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.