Suttree Reviews

• A terrestrial Hell

  
  By AT2R7ZVT7QYOU on 2003-04-02
  I have never used this term in a review, but this is a work of genius. McCarthy's Blood Meridian may have a more taut artistic virtuousity to it, but Suttree rings sprawlingly true to life and love while at the same time delivering the poetic lyricism of the arabesques and grotesqueries of life that stamp McCarthy as the greatest and most visionary writer of our time. Here is the pathos, bitterweetness, and comedy (Can anyone forget Harrogate and the bats, much less his getting off the charge of bestiality because "A mellon ain't no beast"?!?) of being human.-All this delivered in the most magnificent sweeping prose since Lowry (A writer I'd recommend to McCarthy fans) and Faulkner.
  But down to some philosophical nuts and bolts: This is a dark novel displaying a visionary medieval mindset, much like Lowry's Under The Volcano (To my mind, the only other novelist of pure genius of this century..). It is the seemingly effortless interweaving of the visionary with the mundane that make this novel so astounding. We are witnesses to page upon page of brilliant poetic lightenings upon a tableau of "a terrestrial hell" as Suttree puts it, a place which not only he, but we all inhabit.

  To quote at length: "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 this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle."
  
  This is the question this brilliant work thrusts before the reader in page upon glowing page.
  
  

• toil under the sun

  
  By A169CPBR76SEF1 on 2002-10-22
  Prior to reading Cormac McCarthy's "SUTTREE" (1979), my only experience with the author was with his highly touted work, "BLOOD MERIDIAN" (1985). Although the latter work is a unique masterpiece ( utilizing a lightning pace and truly spectacular language ) the breadth and easy flow of "SUTTREE" is completely true to its own quirky nature. Oddly enough, given the stomach churning violence and ( apparent ) triumph of evil portrayed in "BLOOD MERIDIAN", McCarthy's earlier novel is actually the more profoundly sad ( and certainly more humorous ) of the two.

  It is fair to speculate that this work was special to McCarthy since he was drawing a portrait of the town and era in which he grew up ( Knoxville, Tennessee in the 1950's ). Others, who are familiar with the work of William Faulkner ( as I am not ) will be better equipped to discuss whether this "southern" novel bears any major resemblance to the late master from Mississippi. My "take" on "SUTTREE" can only come ( as is natural ) from past literary experiences and, perhaps more importantly, a particular "world view". Although stronger and more learned readers will undoubtedly shed more light on the work, I hope nonetheless that the following thoughts will help others reflect on "SUTTREE" and decide for themselves what it's "all about".

  After a short and soaring descriptive prelude ( a wasteland grotesquerie ), the novel's namesake Cornelius Suttree is introduced. Appropriately enough, this first glimpse takes place alongside the silent and abused Tennessee River, a Styx-like emblem of eternity running through the mid 20th century "Hades" of Knoxville, where Suttree lives on a rundown houseboat. Suttree's desultory "neutrality" towards existence is mixed with hallucinogenic dreams and flashbacks ( a key "vision" in the wilderness is reminiscent of "Snow" from Thomas Mann's "THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN" ). Seemingly carefree, going about his life in moment-to-moment fashion amidst his derelict companions, Suttree in fact lives completely in his past, haunted by ( among other things ) the memory of his patrician upbringing, failed marriage and a mysteriously significant "other". At times he seems an Old Testament prophet, full of insight and sublimated rage ( a contemporary Qoheleth ), his thoughts and actions reflecting the weary ruminations of a man trapped in hopelessness. Suttree's spiritual quandary is in recognizing that while others in his Knoxville circle seem damned by dint of fate, he himself chooses to live in a kind of purgatory, with the possibility of transcending his lot.

  As opposed to the mythological archetypes displayed in "BLOOD MERIDIAN", the quirky and entertaining lost souls so sympathetically rendered in "SUTTREE" are all too human. There are several laugh out loud scenes in the book, many focusing on Suttree's oddball friend Gene Harrogate. Though the humor is intertwined with immense sadness, this aspect of McCarthy's style is a delightful surprise.

  "SUTTREE" is a hard but compassionate glimpse at the tragedy and triumph underlying the human drama (a "story" in which we all play a part). On the basis of the two works with which I'm familiar, Cormac McCarthy writes with both purpose and artistry; surely he deserves his reputation as a modern literary master.
  
  

• Beautiful Ugliness

  
  By on 1999-07-28
  This is a most extraordinary novel, densely packed with dark and dire images, by turns brutal and tender. It is elegant, down and dirty, occasionally shocking and surprisingly funny. I don't know when I have read more beautiful prose describing more debased circumstances than in Suttree.

  I was introduced to this novel by a close friend who was so slammed by the impact of the first page that she had to put it down for a week just to let it sink in. I have to admit, I re-read the first 3 pages about a dozen times throughout my reading of the novel. They do pack a wallop. Actually, there are several passages in the book that so floored me I had to go back and re-read them.

  The language of this tale is incredible, carefully wrought, full of fantastic words (keep a dictionary close by.) At times laconic, at times incredibly detailed. And at times so unrelentingly down and out you just have to laugh. Harold Pinter once praised Samuel Beckett saying that he 'leaves no stone unturned, no maggot lonely.' I'd say the same for McCarthy in this novel. Who else could generate so much sympathy for a melon-humping hayseed dork like Gene Harrogate? Or any other of the motley assemblage with whom Suttree inexplicably chooses to fraternize.

  I don't want to ruin any surprises, so I'll just assure you that Suttree's immersion in debauchery and desolation is not for its own sake. The book has a heart. The book has soul to burn. This is just the best damned novel I've read in years. Maybe ever. Relish it.
  
  

• Suttree

  
  By AT20W1QI86CJL on 2005-05-22
  Absolutely exquisite. Perhaps that adjective gets overused nowadays, but here it is appropriate - perhaps even not strong enough of a term. "Suttree" is a must must must-read. It is such a profound indictment of the human race that it could be used as evidence against us if we are ever sued by space aliens. When viewed in terms of "Blood Meridian" and all of C McC's pre-Natl Book Award works, his range as an author is revealed and is humbling. The man is our greatest living novelist. I am grateful to him for having offered this work to the world.
  
  

• An intelligent anti-intellectual treat

  
  By on 2000-07-11
  If we turn to our hymnals, (Suttree, p. 414):

  "Of what would you repent? ... One thing. 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."

  Forget the comparisons to Faulkner, Melville, and any other fashionable names, or themes that somehow make Suttree sound like he's on a Harry Potter journey. ("Suttree and the Magical Midnight Mellonhumper"?) Or existential searches for meaning. (Can one have an existential search for meaning? But I digress.) Cormac McCarthy has his own unique voice, and it is, well, feculently good in this novel about the self-delusions of one man, Cornelius Suttree, as he attempts to rectify life, having been brought into the world at the same time as his stillborn twin brother. It is a novel to be experienced. The dialogue is stunningly true and a joy to read, and in unique McCarthy fashion, he finds a way to make sublime psychological observations about his characters without resorting to reading their thoughts. Here is a novel that recounts those "living on the edge" without the sentimental romantic claptrap of the Beat writers or Rousseau-rustic rubes. Sure, some of the writing is overwrought -- he spent 20 years writing the thing -- but it's still purty, and it's still McCarthy. To put a label on it, I'd call it a classic in the Southern American anti-intellectual tradition. What that means is this: long after people have tired of reading David Foster Wallace make fun of midwesterners who shop at K mart, or Philip Roth rhapsodizing about his penis, people will be reading the likes of Faulkner, O'Conner and McCarthy for a deeper understanding of our culture, our longings and our mythos. (Sorry. Couldn't help myself. Apologies to Melville.)
  
  

• Where have you gone, my blue-eyed son?
  By AREQ8Y28KG7L on 2002-02-21
  At some point in the adult or even young life, individuals undergo a period of inevitable self-doubt, wondering hypothetically, 'wouldn't it be great if I could just rid myself of all of this and live on a boat somewhere, in a place where no one I know now would ever find me?' or 'God take this pain away from me for I can't take it anymore!' Welcome to the life of Cornelius Suttree, the man who gave up the Matrix for a cragged houseboat in poverty-stricken Knoxville, where the river from which he hauls duck-billed catfish oozes, does not flow. Here the blind stagger and prophecize, junkmen and railroadmen or men who once were railroadmen philosophize on hopelessness (eg. God wouldn't have brought Lazarus back from hell, so he must have been sent back to the living world from heaven, and having seen heaven, how could he ever be happy again?), and black witches from their windows overlooking the gray, stinking city where decrepid youths poison bats with strychnine in order to exchange their stinking black corpses for cash at the local infirmary offer you your fate for a beer...or something like that. Suttree lives the simple life of a riverman, dabbling in catfishing, turtle-dining, and drinking down viscous moonshine - but this is not just a dark story of a man who has lost all hope for the world, though in it nothing goes as we, the readers, would like it to go. The book is an extremely slow read: it can take weeks and even months if not for its darkness then for its implicit requirement for the reader to thumb through his Oxford English Dictionary at least once per page. God, the beauty of the English language CANNOT be lost on the reader when McCarthy is at the pen. By the end of this swelling novel you are trapped in a world of characters, whom McCarthy goes to great lengths to develop. More importantly, you wish for an ending, in the same way you do when watching "Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship..." But what you are confronted with is rather a continuance, as in an important court case. The question is, can the reader find triumph in continuance as opposed to his usual search for the happy ending or just an ending, period? The answer: there is no ending, there never is. But there can be dignity, even in chosen poverty. The book is ultimately a tale of dignity and integrity in a land of hopelessness. Can you bear this?
  
  
• the best
  By AXAUF3SOE13HP on 2006-01-10
  ok...for a brief opinion, i think this is an absolutely amazing work of fiction that ranks up there with the best of faulkner...it ranks up there with the best books ive ever read...the prose really makes me reread passages out loud, just as previously posted by another reviewer...
  
  in response to those that deem the work short on plot, i just wanted to mention this....i could be remembering wrong but i am pretty sure that this is a somewhat autobiographical work that focuses on mccarthy quitting the drink and leaving tennessee for texas...so this is not necessarily the same kind of work that the border trilogy or blood meridian are.
  
  something interesting for me in reading these reviews is that faulkner suffered from the same kind of criticisms, especially while he was alive...lack of structure and coherent plot...
  
  i do believe that he is the greatest living american author...if not, i would love to find the person that beats him.
  
  
• Suttree: an existentialist's search for meaning.
  By on 1998-07-18
  Cormac McCarthy treats the reader to a splendid tale of one man's search for meaning. Cornelius Suttree, a college-educated man recently released from prison, searches for meaning in an unforgiving and absurd world. The reader -- as well as characters in the book -- quickly realizes that Suttree is out of place among the people with whom he lives. His failure to break out is caused by his inability to find purpose or meaning in life, and it is this search which most fascinates me. McCarthy masterfully conveys the complicated struggle within Suttree's mind: a picaresque journey of indecision and enervation.

  The author's accurate rendition of speech patterns and regionalisms animate characters like the ragman and Reese like few depictions I've ever read.

  At times the book becomes too impressionistic, whole pages devoted to a dizzying stream of images that I found difficult to read. In addition, I recognized unusual words repeated throughout the book, but despi! te these few criticisms, Suttree is an unforgettable read!
  
  

• On "Suttree"
  By A166GDZPA2NLAX on 2006-11-16
  In "Suttree", Cormac McCarthy doesn't so much shake the rafters of the illusory of literature as he does bore holes in its foundation. When his novel was published in 1979, you probably would have to have been a McCarthy reader to know about it - undoubtedly, there were erudite McCarthy readers making some noise over his three, previous works, but they were likely fairly small in number. As to his work, the old adage comes to mind: nothing worth having comes easily, and if you are to consider the dark themes and brittle, agrarian subject matter of his pre-Suttree work, you might be able to explain his relative obscurity. But, oh, how McCarthy takes these themes into Knoxville, Tennessee and with stunning craftsmanship, conjures up a visionary, humdinger of a novel. We have before us an astonishingly compelling and deeply personal opus that only a master storyteller could construct.
  
  Rarely in the litany of the written word has the reader been so thoughtfully engaged. It is not as though you are unaware that McCarthy is taking you on a journey through seamy, 1950's Knoxville, it is how he creates the circuitous relationship between the viewer and the protagonist. You are simultaneously inside and outside and underneath Buddy Suttree, rapidly shifted in your radiant postion to the character, at the same time left to fill in the mysterious blanks in his past. This is McCarthy's astounding gift: he is generous without being patronizing, humorous without the slightest wrinkle of a smile. He paints and sculpts and carves with the casual attitude of a man at work on an assembly line though, of course, this is not manufactured-for-the-masses stuff here. The viewer's suddenly shifted point of view, however, is not limited to the main characters. The detail is so intense, that even the peripheral dead are given life: (pg 287) "In an old granfather time a ballad transpired here, some love gone wrong and a sabletressed girl drowned in an icegreen pool where she was found with her hair spreading like ink on the cold and cobbled river floor. Ebbing in her bindings, langrous as a sea dream. Looking up with eyes made huge by the water at the bellies of trout and the well of the rimpled world beyond." You are given the keys and the engine is running and you are therefore involved in the story in such a way as to have omniscience over all the characters. You are strangely confident that you will see the action from all sorts of dizzying angles, at the same moment laughing at the dire circumstances of the characters and McCarthy's lard-heavy, homespun humor.
  
  Perhaps the most profoundly unique quality of "Suttree" is the language it is spoken in. There are many passages that will cause your jaw to drop, unable to quite say: oh, my God! he's made a deal with the devil! The beauty of the prose is not only generous; it is dense, ever prevalent. Ornate, Gothic-like depictions abound and are not confined to the commonplace. The author scripts these passages seemingly at will, as expertly painting polluted First Creek in all its reviling filth as he does Suttree's tender but ambivalent encounters with the girl, Wanda, and the prostitute, Joyce. Juxtaposed, is the hilarious dialect of East Tennessee, which is cleverly rendered and not confined to the notion that all are white and of Scotch-Irish descent. Knoxville and the Tennessee River come breathing off the pages like a war-torn, decimated moonscape and you are overwhelmed, not only with architectural oddities, but with slapstick sketches of shanty town ghettoes.
  
  While this is literature of the highest caliber, it is probably not for everyone. If you see Cormac McCarthy on the book jacket, you might want to go back up the aisle in pursuit of less existential reading. But if you believe that literature has the power to illuminate the paean that is the written word, then you might give "Suttree" the nod. You may very well not look at novels the same thereafter. It is the rare novel that invites you to recite its lines long after they have been pulled through you. This one has that power. It is one you will be reluctant to move from its place on your nightstand into the common book population on your shelves.
  
  Note of caution: This reviewer suffers the prejudice of locale. Thre are scenes from "Suttree" that run in precise locale to his wanderings as a small child. He played soldiers in the same bushes where one melon-fancier hid, spent nights as a young man in those same, frigid mountains and wandered hallucinogenically over the same mica-glazed sidewalks of Fort Sanders. "Ain't that right Mizz Mull."
  
  
• Best by Far
  By A2YNIRQA2JJTKQ on 2004-08-06
  I cannot understand anyone having a problem with this book. Maybe it is too long for some but that is why it is called literature. Likewise, if you do not like the slow pace and lack of action, pick up a Grisham novel during your visit to the airport and chuckle along the way. This is the best southern McCarthy novel by far and equal to Blood Meridian. Remember, turtles make good soup and do not try and kill your neighbor's pig without first asking.
  
  
• Incredible incredible
  By A1DZKM9YWMH3I1 on 1998-11-20
  As the sergeant in Blood Meridian (written six years after Suttree) says when the Indians appear-- Oh my god. Suttree is a tour de force of bizzarely accurate prose, with a depth of characterization surpassing many authors who have dared to take on protagonists enwrapped in such sad and human conflict. Cornelius Suttree is the existentialist wunderkind, a thinker unthought who up and leaves a domestic life known by most to enter a life squalid and aimless. As McCarthy does so well, the sadness of the life he teeters on edges of maintains a dignity that makes this novel deep and brassy, with a flow that does justice to what human traits we will always remain proud within. Five hundred pages of text comprise a story fascinating in its human spirals, and if one could enjamb the entire novel it would rival Homer in its poetic landscape. Considered by many to be the zenith of McCarthy's southern poesis, this book will delve within your mind and remain there for years remaining. Though dark in its rendering of outer Knoxville's "slow cataclysm of neglect," this text we can only name a novel will speak to our race longer than we shall.
  
  
• A beautiful book of the qrotesque and bizarre.
  By on 1997-08-12
  This early work (1979) by Cormac McCarthy places him squarely in the front ranks beside Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner as one of the great authors of the Southern Gothic genre.

  Cornelius Suttree lives alone in a houseboat on the Tennesee River where he ekes out a meager living selling the fish he catches. Although his own family is well-to-do, Cornelius prefers the company of the outcasts, criminals and alcoholics of this river community. Although not of them, he moves easily among them and has a a true affection for the grotesque and eccentric. Young Harrogate, who dreams of the perfect crime while living in a cave, the transvestite Tripping Through the Dew, the Indian, the ragpicker, Leonard, who keeps trying to dispose of his father's decomposing corpse--these are just a few of the memorable characters populating this novel.

  In addition to the very real people he has created, Mr. McCarthy also uses language in a unique and poetic manner. Suttree is a beautiful and incomparable vision of a world both familiar and unknown.

  Nancy Thorn
  
  

• Infection
  By A2WKT4Q8FFQKUV on 2005-09-01
  I in 1996 I bought and read All the Pretty Horses first. Laughed myself off the train seat in to town. Bought the whole lot and read them in chronological order - re-reading Pretty Horses on the way. Along with scenes from the Orchard Keeper, Sutree sticks in my mind - images ideas, flavours, jokes, and a personality that I'd rather see more of. Sutree made me feel that I know this man, and could even like him. Great fun, and deserves selfish time to read and unwind after reading.
  
  
  
• Meanders like a river, rushes like a flood
  By A1BD16XFKEN3IV on 2007-04-19
  I've read all McCarthy's books and this might be my favorite. Only a master could weave these murky memories into such a spell-binding story. The plot (what there is of it) meanders at the languid pace of the Tennessee River and -- though it contains no real conflict (save Suttree's shadowy fits) -- I could not stop turning the pages. I closed the book with more empathy for Suttree than any literary character I can remember. The book is sublime.
  
  
• Powerfully written
  By A3SO4SZPDNW0S3 on 2000-05-18
  First, the prose of this book. It is something uniquely its own, yet standing on the shoulders of soÏmany wonderfulworks of art:perhaps the 20th century heir of past epic verse poetry works. Indeed, this book could be the great great grandchild of the Odyssey, and the second cousin of James Joyce's Ulysses, which I hated. Perhaps McCarthy learned something from Joyce's mistakes and wrote a stream of consciousness novel that is actually readable. (Ah! Ack! English professors everywhere are putting out a contract on my life right now! I not only said I hated Joyce, I said he made mistakes!)

  Still, this is definitely literature, in the way that most people would use "literature" as a bad word. There 's no real clear moving plot, no suspense or climax, no hero (not really) and no villain. Nothing is at stake here, no wars or court cases or people's lives. Of course, in that way it is much more like real life, but hey, a lot of people have enough of that and don't want to read about it too. "Give us heroes," they cry. "Give us glorious battles and terrible defeats, worlds in the balance, loves and lives and the future of all mankind at stake. Give us DRAMA!" This is not the book for them.

  In fact, McCarthy seems to want to avoid drama, mostly. Even the premise of the book-- a richÏyoung man who gives up all he has to be a bum along the shores of the Tennessee River--is way too dramatic, and is downplayed as much as possible. It hardly appears in the book at all, and then indirectly. This is a book about life, plain old life, if you can call bumming it along the river plain life.

  Yes, this is a romance of the poor and beggardly, the drunk and skunkenly, the unpleasant yet beautiful, colorful and dirty folks of the underworld, the forgottens of Knoxville in all their glory. And I, for one, love it. It makes me want to leave my life, my nice little life, my forty hours a week life, and fish on the river, get drunk and suffer, live, die, and rise. Straight up, I've gotta say the hero reminds me of my man Jesus, cheesy or weird as that may sound to you. But the way he walks among the unpleasants, lives with grace, love, and no hint of judgement...it's amazing, it's beautiful, and I love it.

  Yes, I love it. I love this book. It took me six months to read it because I loved it so much I had to take it slow and savor it. And the day I finished it, I almost turned right around and started at the front again. That's the joy of a (basically) plotless book: it's somewhat seamless, a circle in upon itself. This is the second time I've read it (the first time was for a class, and way too fast and with too much pressure and stress attached) and chances are, I'll read it again. McCarthy's other books are already on my reading list, though one of them was made into a Matt Damon movie and I can't imagine McCarthy and Matt Damon existing in the same universe. But I guess I'll have to read it to find out.
  A small smackering of that beautiful, truly beautiful writing:

  "He woke with the undersides of his eyelids inflamed by the high sun's hammering, looked up to a bland and chinablue sky traversed by lightwires. A big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better and it elongated itself like hot taffy down the side of the stove and vanished headfirst in the earth without a sound. Suttree lay with his hands palm up at his sides in an attitude of frailty beheld and the stink that fouled the air was he himself. He closed his eyes and moaned. A hot breeze was coming across the barren waste of burnt weeds and rubble like a whiff of battlesmoke. Some starling had alighted on a wire overhaed in perfect progression like a peice of knotted string fallen slantwise. Crooning, hooked wings. Foul yellow mutes came squeezing from under their fanned tails. He sat up slowly, putting a hand over his eyes. The birds flew. His clothes cracked with a thin dry sound and shreds of baked vomit fell from him. He struggled to his knees, staring down at the packe balck earth between his palms with its bedded cinders and bits of crockery. Sweat rolled down his skull and dripped from his jaw. Oh God, he said. He lifted his swollen eyes to the desolation in which he knelt, the ironcolored nettles and sedge in the reeking fields like mock weeds made from wire, a raw landscape where half familiar shapes reared from the slagheaps of trash. Where backlots choked with weeds and glass and the old chalky turds of passing dogs tended away toward a dim shore of stonegray shacks and gutted auto hulks. He looked down at himself, caked in filth, his pockets turned out. He tried to swallow but his throat constricted in agony. tottering to his feet he stood reeling in that apocalyptic waste like some biblical relict in a world no one would have." (pg80-81)
  
  

• Superior
  By A1EYC46AIPJDYA on 1999-08-06
  This is a superior work by perhaps the finest living American writer. None better. If you aren't moved by this guy's work, your better check your pulse.
  
  
• Colorful tribute to the strength of human spirit
  By on 1997-07-21
  SUTTREE is an extraordinary book, certainly among Cormac McCarthy's best. McCarthy has a special talent for capturing exactly the right colloquial tone and cadence of dialogue to convince the reader that the story being told is as authentic as the evening news. For me that talent is especially apparent in SUTTREE. Through a series of encounters with the best and worst of desperate people -- kindly, foolish, selfish, and mean, the reader gradually learns more of the events that shaped the life of the principal character- Suttree, along with the emotions that compel him and the values that sustain him. While the story begins and ends with Suttree, McCarthy treats the reader along the way to a highly entertaining tapestry of life set along the raw edge of a working river and rural Tennessee. I found the book passionate, compassionate, laugh-out-loud funny, sobering, violent, and ultimately uplifting. SUTTREE is classic McCarthy and a wonderful read.
  
  
• A beautifully written book about revolting people
  By A1R2SJZGHH14E7 on 2000-05-10
  5 stars for an outstanding book, but just one star for being a pleasant read. The characters were convincing but totally unlikeable -- self-indulgent, self-destructive, sordid, and degenerate.

  The setting -- 1950s Knoxville -- was also very well-done, but again unappealing.

  I read about halfway through this book mainly to get a feel for my hometown in the 50s. Finally I gave up -- I just didn't want to be around any of the characters any more.

  If you like this sort of thing, you'll love this book -- it is very well-written. It's just not my taste.
  
  

• Knoxville's Faulkneresque underworld
  By A2YF4ZMECJVLK9 on 2007-03-12
  Set outside of Knoxville over several cold winters and hot summers during the early 1950s, Cormac McCarthy's novel introduces us to the outcasts, bums, and criminals (both petty and felonious) who claim friendship with Cornelius Suttree, a college-educated, privileged man who has left his wife and son to live hand-to-mouth selling fish caught from his houseboat on the Tennessee River.
  
  Suttree's is a life of excess and disappointments: his rare windfalls go to liquor, his two attempts at romance are doomed, he allows himself frequently to be taken advantage of by both strangers and friends, and many of his associates end up dead or in jail. His drunken sprees (and, especially, their aftermaths) provide much of the hilarity; many sections begin with sentences along the lines of "He woke in full daylight by the side of a road."
  
  Most memorably, in one of the novel's many flashbacks to Suttree's time in a county workhouse, we meet "countrymouse" Gene Harrogate, a young, delinquent, wide-eyed idealist who is arrested for--well, I can't rightly tell you without spoiling one of the most hilarious scenes in the book. Gene eventually sets up quarters in a cave under the city bridge, which he exhibits to Suttree with as much fanfare as a New Yorker would show off a rent-stabilized loft in SoHo and where he develops outlandish schemes to become wealthy. Throughout, I kept imagining that Harrogate had wandered into Tennessee from a long-lost Flannery O'Connor story. At first the novel's perspective alternates between Suttree and Harrogate, but eventually this becomes Suttree's story.
  
  Having read four Faulkner novels during the past year, I was a little disoriented reading "Suttree." While the characters and the episodic storyline certainly echo other writers (Twain, Steinbeck, Joyce, and obviously O'Connor), its style picks up where Faulkner's "Sanctuary" and "Pylon" left off. Most superficially, McCarthy adopts and adapts Faulkner's punctuation hiccups and his tendency to invent compound words (bibpocket, packingcrate, sootstreaked). He also exhibits what has become a trademark habit of using arcane and archaic words (mascled, warfarined, slaverous--four times!). But, ultimately, it was McCarthy's third-person omniscient descriptions of Suttree's drunken sprees that firmly planted me back in Faulkner's Old South. I've claimed that nobody does drunk like Faulkner--but McCarthy places second in a strong showing.
  
  There is a strong streak of melancholy and despair running through the book, yet, like William Vollmann, McCarthy instills his characters with so much humanity, along with an unrealistically resilient optimism, that they are, more often than not, endearing even when their hopes are predictably dashed. For all of the book's surface resemblances to so many other literary antecedents, the degenerates and scalawags who populate "Suttree" still manage to be unique and memorable.
  
  
• An Original
  By A6YBA8W9V0TRC on 2001-09-20
  How does McCarthy do it? Once again he manages to create a compendium of totally original, three-dimensional characters. If I had to pigeonhole this book, I would call it a picaresque, a type of novel not seen much anymore. This is a modern day Don Quixote or Tristam Shandy or Tom Jones, although it is set among a bunch of likeable (mostly) losers (mostly) in Knoxville, Tennessee in the early 1950s. The title character, Cornelius Suttree, reminded me of the Jack Nicholson character in "Five Easy Pieces," a man from a somewhat privileged background who gives it all up to live on a dilapidated houseboat near Knoxville.

  One of the best episodes in the book occurs early on, when Suttree learns that his child has died and goes to be with, and comfort, and hopes to be comforted by, his estranged wife. I won't spoil it for anyone, but after you read it just imagine how it would be handled by a lesser writer. There would have been a lot of flashbacks showing what happened historically in the relationship, etc. McCarthy gives us none of that. He just describes what happens in the present, then moves on, never looking back.

  This book is longish, and McCarthy's prose is riveting but difficult. I find McCarthy's usee of pronouns especially annoying. He may be discussing two male characters, and then say "he," and I am never sure which one he is referring to. By and large, however, this is an excellent read.
  
  

• May be the Best Book I've Ever Read
  By A26TWY9AD935HC on 2002-07-01
  In my opinion, this novel by Cormac McCarthy is one of the great pieces of American fiction. The story follows Cornelius Sutree, a son of a wealthy family, who has exiled himself to a fishing boat in mid-20th century Tennessee. Sutree mixes with a cast of down on their luck, eccentric charecters while scraping for a living in the outer margins of society. McCarthy's descriptive imagery is strong enough to put you in the midst of the story. His use of dialect and atmosphere is down to earth on minute, then drifting into almost hallucinagetic prose the next. The mixture of brilliant characters and rich atmosphere make this a pleasure to read or re-read.
  
  
• Melodramatic
  By A1IYAS1PDTCRBU on 2005-11-07
  McCarthy is a very talented writer (read Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses) but he is also known for a very melodramatic style of writing, using many archaic words. Suttree is written is this style and one could say it is 471 pages of melodrama without a plot. Despite the novel's length it is very underdeveloped and the reader is not sure why he should even care about the main character. Certain chapters are interesting (the workhouse chapter especially), but these passages are few and far between. Also the violence at times is ridiculous and does nothing to advance his ever prevalent theory that the world has always been this way and will continue in this way. McCarthy writes about nature beautifully, but after finishing this book, one is left unfulfilled.
  
  
• Enough whining about the plot
  By A2G1VOQFBEKJRX on 2006-07-01
  Suttree is an extremely challenging book. I picked it up, read the first thirty or so pages, then put it down for two years before I finally dedicated myself to reading the whole thing. The narrative occurs in elliptic little episodes, with no particular overarching plot. Many reviewers here have cited this as a flaw, but McCarthy is breaking the ordinary traditions of narrative here for a reason - a life does not progress in neat order, nor do most people live to see some golden denouement that makes sense of all their previous decisions. Suttree the character lives without this happy sense of order, and McCarthy has no desire to provide it to the reader. As in life, some things happen, some more things happen, and then the story ends. In the hands of a less skillful writer this could have been an appalling mess, but McCarthy's incredible gifts make it at once satisfying and heartbreakingly incomplete.
  
  
• McCormac Was Great Even Back Then
  By A27APP7TTCME2P on 2007-01-10
  Up until a few years ago, when my dentist turned me on to the Broder Trilogy, my life was sadly incomplete without having read Cormac McCarthy. After devouring the Trilogy, and everthing after that, I started reading some of his earlier works to see if he was just as good back then. I was not disappointed with Suttree and found this book in many ways even finer that some of his later works. What a fantastic story with such amazing writing. I just love how he puts two words together to make up a new word that says more than the two individual words, like "windowlight" or "shopsigns" or "coalsoot." Every paragraph and every sentence in this book is intricately crafted and highly descriptive. It has the typical grittyness of a McCarthy novel and he truely brings the characters to life. Cormac McCarthy is one of the greatest living writers today and one of my top three favorite authors. Reading Suttree confirmed for me that he has been at the top of his form for over three decades.
  
  
• Not My Existence Here in the Fifties!
  By A2F3SXHT6RBV81 on 2007-01-20
  The bridge on the cover of this book is just one of three we had to cross Fort Loudon (part of the Tennessee River) in downtown Knoxville when I was growing up. He wrote about the pigeons which abounded here, particulary in the underbelly of the Greyhound Bus Station situated on Gay Street at that time. Now, today, the town wants rid of them and has brought in predators to kill them out in the open for all to see. Our beloved main street in town has been taken over by yuppies from who knows where and they don't like or want to see birds, trees or city buses on their turf. They did entice the young mayor to let them have their own liquor store on our sacred street so they would not have to stoop to riding one of the disgusting buses. They have blasphemed this sacred (to us native Knoxvillians) street of my childhood. I came home to the downtown area, but now I hate it and what it stands for.
  
  Evidence of the fallen ladies in the upper stories of the retail store was noticeable, as now. We have that kind who were relocated here from New Orleans and prey on the bus drivers. Back then, the madams and houses were profiting from police protection and some rotten cops who brought girls there as laundresses?
  
  Did they call tennis shoes "sneakers" back then? I must have been so innocent to have missed that, but I detested that kind of footwear anyway. It was not dignified. The large carp were still in evidence at the 1982 World's Fair (huge fish) and are at Volunteer Landing to this day.
  
  This fictitious story is about Cornelius Suttree as a wandering (you might say "homeless" even) fisherman with a vivid imagination, especially at night where he spent his time fishing on the Tennessee River under the bridges and along the slopes down Sequoyah way as it meanders through the town from one end to the other. He is young and rebelling against his privileged life as a member of a prominent family. Sounds like someone I know who told me that life here in the Fifties was not good! He got that wrong idea from reading this long book. Suttree was a pre-hippie (a dropout from society) and he sees what he wants to see only it's the under belly of the old town, which he thinks is unique. Actually, a small town Pulaski had the same shacks, poverty, and human squalor in my life time about as bad as this big town.
  
  It seems that young Mr. Suttree has had some kind of mental breakdown and has become the same as a bum seeing what he choose and not factually, but through a glass darkly. In fact, he appears to be one of the mental patients which this town spawns every generation. Written as fiction, but used as the basis of past history by some, McCarthy would be proud that his sordid book is used as reference material. Sure, some of the sites are locateable still but what took place there is a "figment of his imagination."
  
  His thesis was so good that he received grants from the Rockefeller Foundation (those who formed the University of Chicago) and the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to complete 471 (in the paperback) pages of nonsense. The town is real and still backward for the times; it has never been a progressive town unless you talk about bars, stills, breweries on Gay Street such, but one of hard drinkers, fighters, family fueders and so on. It could as easily been Pittsburg, PA, Cincinnati, Ohio, or any place in between with a river running through or around the downtown area.
  
  It's pure drivel, not fact in any way, not history; for entertainment value only. It's too bad that some newcomers have been influenced by the poor conditions of this town's past and came here to change things. Even I was foolish enough to believe I was reading history before I came to know the local history writer. This is an old book -- and none of it is factual, none.
  
  
• Not Alone, But Lonely
  By A2QSEUYU3HVPZ5 on 2007-05-18
  Suttree is the story of an emotionally wounded loner who lives among a motley assortment of criminals, alcoholics, and other societal outcasts on the outskirts of Knoxville in the 1950s. Suttree is estranged from his family, but it's never made completely clear why he walked out his wife and child, his relatives, and the life of privilege he led. Surviving day-to-day on whatever money he earns from the spoils of his fishing, he never has more than a few dollars in his pocket, and those are inevitably spent by the day's end.
  
  In this world of misfits and outcasts, happiness and companionship are fleeting. Hunger, cold, and drunkeness fill days. But there is more, the community that Suttree inhabits is filled with characters who befriend, support, and care for each other. Each character innately understanding the vulnerability they have in common. Each having experienced degrees of pain and hopelessness.
  
  McCarthy's prose is complex and dense; more than average concentration is required of the reader. It's not uncommon to find yourself re-reading passages, each re-reading allowing the words and imagery to more fully unfold in your mind. The payoff are passages rich and full of feeling. The world McCarthy describes has layer upon layer of detail and through Suttree's gaze the elemental and temporal nature of life is revealed.
  
  I'd recommend McCarthy to patient and focused readers. People who don't need an immediate payoff and who appreciate prose and language. An alternative to Suttree is Blood Meridian, a more intense, violent, and perhaps more accessible work. McCarthy is an author who will leave an impression.
  
  Some quotes:
  
  "The willows at the far shore cut from the night a prospect of distant mountains dark against a paler sky. Halfmoon incandescent in her black galatic keyway, the heavens locked and wheeling. A sole star to the north pale and constant, the old wanderer's beacon burning like a molten spike that tethered the Small Bear to the turning firmament. He closed his eyes and opened them and looked again. He was struck by the fidelity of this earth he inhabited and he bore it sudden love."
  
  "You see a man, he scratchin' to make it. Think once he got it made everything be all right. But you don't never have it made. Don't care who you are. Look up one morning and you a old man. You got nothin to say to your brother. Don't know no more'n when you started."
  
  "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. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus."
  
  "Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them."
  
  
  
• This was such a strange feeling...
  By A6GX3FHNSIV1W on 1999-09-02
  I read Suttree about two years ago, and like all of the other readers who commented, I was floored. Last week, I read Faulkner's Sanctuary, and when I got to the section of the book that takes place in Memphis, I had this really strange feeling of deja vu. Then I realized where I'd "been" to Memphis before; Suttree. Incredible.
  
  
• A great [read]
  By A2V9UEZNWFUVC on 2002-09-14
  Going through the bookstore, I spotted Suttree on the shelf. After reading the back cover I thought it would be a very interesting book since I've never heard of a more stranger plot and characters. In the end they didn't seem so strange, but more like your corky neighbors each different. McCormac's excellent description walks along the fine line of too much and not enough. By the first 50 pages it was the best book I've ever read, by the end of the book, it was the only one that moved me, made me want to read it again and again, and it is the ONLY book I've ever recommended to my friends.

  You Have to go and buy this book!!
  
  

• A Masterpiece
  By ABJ88JZ1DYXCO on 2006-12-27
  "Suttree" is, without a doubt, the most amazing book I've ever read ... seriously. It is written in the most dazzling, sumptuous language ... poetry of the highest order. This book has haunted and mesmerized me for years.
  
  
• Risky lyrical prose yet lacking sufficient editing and substance
  By A3DOV73EYWJW5B on 2007-05-14
  Most reviewers, professional or not would commend Mccarthy for Suttree or the Border trilogy as his magnus opus, though I'd reckon not. Indeed the lyrical prose in Suttree elevates standards in English literature with neologisms and erudite syntax as should that of any literary master, yet sometimes, now I mean a few occasional chapters and segments in which intense human emotions are compounded, say the death of a loved one, or some inevitable parting by fate, Mccarthy resorts to mere description, often overtly hollywood and trite--lacking in compassion and humanity and courage, qualities by which Faulkner makes adept use of.
  
  To speak Mccarthyesque means to speak of purgatorial violence and its philosophy and affect on our consciousness and religion. What he does not do well is his way with familial issues particularly with the psychology of father-son relationships. Mccarthy fails to delve into the substratum of character denoument and development by overtly focusing on novel language of simple emotions--He is not condonable nor credible as a father, loving or not, simply because some readers realize that Mccarthy simply is not a father and never will be a father at all (The Road exemplary). Aside from an attempt of achieving a negation of archetypal bildungsromain as seen in Blood Meridian, the emotional constellation of Suttree and his lover(s)/ sons was a huge disappointment for me. I would stick with Faulkner's collection "The Country" instead.
  
  Mccarthy does well by completely forsaking character development (as with blood meridian) rather than explicating simple emotions propounded in a lyrical voice that compromises its very meaning, which is the daunting weakness (though understandable) of modern avant-garde poets and musicians alike.
  
  

• Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West
• Child of God
• Outer Dark
• No Country for Old Men (Vintage International)
• The Orchard Keeper