Title: Suttree
Rating: 5 Stars
I’ve just about read all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels. I think that the only ones that I had left was this one and his last, Stella Maris. Published in 1979 and written over a period of twenty years, I have to say that Suttree is the most Cormac McCarthy novel that I’ve ever read.
First of all, it’s absolutely beautifully written. It’s McCarthy novels like these that have critics make so many comparisons to Faulkner. The words just flow on the page. His landscape descriptions seem drawn by a painter.
Here you see his fondness for arcane and obscure words. On nearly every page you’ll encounter a word that’s new to you. I find it best to read McCarthy much as I read Shakespeare. You just kind of have to accept the fact that there are going to be words that you won’t know. Many times you can puzzle out the meaning by the context in which it appears. Other times you can’t. You might be tempted to put the book down and go a googling but in so doing you’ll find yourself being pulled out of the narrative.
Being a brilliant composer of the English language, you might think that McCarthy would create narratives populated by intelligent, sophisticated characters living a life of leisure (I’m looking at you Henry James). McCarthy loves living in the muck. His characters are often grotesque. His plots are full of characters making horrible choices with worse consequences. The occasionally hideous underbelly of living life in the 1950s Knoxville is on display here. Although elegantly written, there is no shortage of racial / sexist epithets and crude descriptions of body parts.
The story centers around Cornelius Suttree. Educated with a wife and a child, he has abandoned them and is now residing on a derelict houseboat living as a fisherman. The novel opens with Suttree out on his boat retrieving his trap lines. As he fishes, in front of him, a suicide victim that jumped into the river is pulled out with a grappling hook embedded in his head.
A second character named Harrogate first meets Suttree when they are in prison together. Harrogate is first in prison having been caught, um, red handed, having sex with nearly every watermelon in a farmer’s patch.
Those are pretty much the first two images of the novel. Especially for early McCarthy (I’m thinking of Child of God most especially), this grotesque imagery is par for the course. The fact that these images are described and written so beautifully both makes the imagery that much more grotesque but also darkly funny.
Combining extremely dark humor with tragedy is another hallmark of McCarthy. Make no mistake about it, this book is grim. By the end of the novel, many of the characters are dead, often violently. Suttree’s child dies. A young woman that Suttree was having an affair with dies in a landslide. A sex worker that Suttree had another affair with loses her mind. Suttree sinks ever deeper into the filth of the life that he has chosen, getting hopelessly drunk, nearly always impoverished, and almost dying of typhoid fever.
Amidst all of this grimness is dark humor. In some parts of the novel I found myself laughing out loud. The situations that the characters find themselves in are often ridiculous. The characters, even as they are flailing about, often display and express a knowing, ironic self awareness.
Harrogate especially finds himself in ridiculous situations. He engages in a series of get rich schemes that never quite seem to work. Learning that Knoxville is giving out a bounty for rabid bats, he attempts a scheme to kill dozens of bats at a time. Knowing that Knoxville actually rests upon a set of caves, he endeavors to spelunk through the caves to find one located under a bank vault. In the caves, coming upon a concrete wall, he resolves to dynamite the wall with a predictable lack of success. His final scheme involves stealing nickels from a large number of payphones in the Knoxville area. He gets caught in this final theft and must spend years in the penitentiary.
This is not original to me, but as I read this, I was struck by its echo of another comedic novel about living on a river in the South. Of course, I’m talking about Huckleberry Finn. As with Finn, this novel is a series of misadventures by misfits. It’s a much darker, more tragic version, but even so, I like to think of Suttree as being basically Huck Finn all grown up.
To close, I’d like to include a paragraph from Suttree. It’s kind of a long one, but I found it both amusing and representative of McCarthy’s writing style at this point in his career.
Mr Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.
dorkenstein 