Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of 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 corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you. This is the first sentence in the prologue of Suttree, the fourth book of Cormac McCarthy. And, although this sentence suggests otherwise, this is a book with paragraphs and punctuation and mostly normal length sentences. There are, however, no quotation marks which makes the reading a little more exciting.I would describe the two and a half page prologue as McCarthy saying, “OK. I have a pretty extensive and amazing vocabulary so have a dictionary ready if you want to fully explore my writing.” However, I am not in the look-up-every-word-you-do-not-know camp. You can read the pages even if you do not know what every word means. Thank goodness the prologue has more meaning-disabled words per line than the rest of the book.If you Google “Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town” you will find that this introductory sentence has attracted a good deal of attention.There is a line you won’t find in the book but ought to be there:“My name is Sutree and I’m an alcoholic.” “Hi, Suttree.”Page after page of drinkin’. Someone was helping him. He rose from a dream, a ragestrangled face screaming at him. He reeled toward the door. In the corridor he turned and made his way along to the rear of the house, caroming from wall to wall. A black woman stepped from out of the woodwork and came toward him. They feinted. She passed. He clattered into a bureau and fell back and went on. At the rear of the hallway he floundered through a curtain and stood in a small room. Somewhere before him in the dark people were breeding with rhythmic grunts. He backed out. He pulled at a doorknob. His gorge gave way and the foul liquors in his stomach welled and spewed. He tried to catch it in his hands. Page after page of bloody fightin’: He pulled himself up a swaying wall and tried to see. All that frantic bedlam before him seemed to have slowed and each perfect face swam off in perfect parallax like warriors and their mentors twinned, a roomful of hostile and manic Siamese. Ahhh, said Suttree. Making his way toward the door with a faint surge of the fairyland feeling from childhood wonders that the face he passed wide eyed by the side of an upturned table was a dead man. Someone going with him saw him see. That’s fucking awful, he said. Suttree was bleeding from the ears and couldn’t hear well but he thought so too. They stumbled on like the damned in off the plains of Gomorrah. Before they reached the door someone hit him in the head with a bottle. Beautiful women: Suttree studies her. Her bony sootstreaked arms were bare to the shoulder and one bore a slaverous and blueblack panther. He could see part of a peacock, a wreath with the name Wanda and the words Rest in Peace 1942. He had his head tilted studying the blue runes on her legs when she turned with her beer. She hiked her skirt up around her waist with one hand and cocked her leg forward. A hound was chasing a rabbit down her belly toward her crotch. She said: When you get your eyes full, open your mouth. Get the picture? Just the way McCarthy imagined it? I think you get the idea. And on it goes.Suttree undoubtedly gets some extra stars because of its reputation. A two becomes a three. A three becomes a four. And all the violence and gore is so constant that I sort of got used to it. There was no adrenalin rush because I was eventually reading for the language more than the story. The slime from blood and vomit and pee and shit just became a part of the picture over and over. I mean, how much worse could the next page be after this one? It turns out it could be much worse…I subscribe to this thought when I can summon the courage:As Virginia Woolf said in describing the library of her elusive character Jacob (in her novel “Jacob’s Room”), “anyone who’s worth anything reads just what he likes, as the mood takes him, and with extravagant enthusiasm.” Two stars because I had to struggle several time to get through it and then to finish it. Not wanting to finish a book is not a rating to be sought. This sewer, as festooned as it is with remarkable prose, was just too long and unsanitary for me. There was just too much pouring it on: See what’s under this slime? More slime! OK, 2½ stars. But that won’t show up in the heading. That’s just to concede that there is some amazing writing to be found here. Enough descriptive paragraphs for an entire lecture hall of first year English students.
I thought Blood Meridian was one of the best books I'd ever read - I still think so, I suppose, since I haven't re-read it in years, and have instead settled for recommending it with the kind of pretentious certainty (e.g., "Without a doubt one of the greatest novels written in the past century") I develop when I'm really enthusiastic.But I'm wondering, now, whether I've been wrong all this time, and whether I might owe some people an apology, because Suttree is truly, astoundingly awful. So awful, in fact, that the thought of typing out all my annotations of its flaws is exhausting, so I'll settle for adumbration and hope the credibility of soured fandom is enough for you to trust me when I say Don't. Read. This book.First of all, the writing is irritating. I don't say that lightly, because Pulitzer-prize winning novelist Robert Olen Butler once called my writing "irritating" to my face, and it has since become one of the most damning epithets I can apply to a work of literature, along with "high-octane" and "postmodern." The cadence is repetitious, and how many times can you use the word "concatenated" before it gets ridiculous? I would take a guess at McCarthy's answer, but it would probably just be something racist.I read Huckleberry Finn and had the whole "IS it racist?" conversation in high school, and based on that experience alone, I believe I have a more sophisticated grasp than McCarthy of how to use racially charged language in a work of fiction without actually espousing, or at least passively endorsing, shitty, hateful attitudes. Tip: don't refer to ANY, much less EVERY, non-white character as "the black" in the course of third-person narration that is clearly NOT free-indirect discourse. I don't care how dense your style is: at some point, it's going to become clear that these are not the main character's actual thoughts, and at that point, you have to give the reader some reason to think that the work is using racist language in a productive or critical way, rather than just . . . using it.Also, do not write the following sentences - the second one, especially, constitutes an Olympian feat of pure assholery:[The door] opened on a female dwarf coalblack in widow's weeds who wore little goldwire spectacles on a chain about her neck. Scarce four feet tall she was, her hand on the doorknob at her ear like a child or a trained house ape.And what transpires between Suttree (our hero) and this character later on? He has a vision. In which she devours him. With her vagina.It isn't sexy.Dust fell from her, her eyes rolled wetly in the red glow from the fireplace. A dried black and hairless figure rose from her fallen rags, the black and shriveled leather teats like empty purses hanging, the thin and razorous palings of the ribs wherein hung a heart yet darker . . .Dead reek of aged female flesh, a stale aridity. Dry wattled nether lips hung from out the side of her torn stained drawers. Her thighs spread with a sound of rending ligaments, dry bones dragging in their sockets. Her shriveled cunt puckered open like a mouth gawping. He flailed bonelessly in the grip of a ghast black succubus, he screamed a dry and soundless scream. In the pale reach of firelight on the ceiling spiders were clambering toward the cracks in the high corners of the room and his spine was sucked from his flesh and fell clattering to the floor like a jointed china snake.. . . really? The melodrama. The cliche. The SPIDERS. The general over-the-topness and misogyny. If you were to somehow fuse a dime-store romance novelist with Patrick Bateman, this is how the resulting creature would talk.Which is odd, because Suttree (the character) has a great relationship with women. He's not gainfully employed, he's unwashed, and he's a drunkard, but some women just . . . want him. Unfortunately, the very fact of their wanting him may be a kind of curse: the two women who exhibit actual sexual desire in this book meet grisly fates. One has what appears to be a nervous breakdown ("some kind of fit"). The other is killed in an event that meets the legal definition of an Act of God.There's more. But what's the point? I wanted to read this book. I was excited. I expended a goodly portion of my precious gift card on it. The New Republic assured me that "McCarthy meditates on creation, stares at it. He does not look past appearances, he looks through them . . . The world is set before us with fever-dream clarity. " Unfortunately, it's the fever dream of some pusillanimous adolescent boy: fascinated by black people, attracted to them, and disgusted by them. Fascinated by women, attracted to them, and disgusted by them. McCarthy seems to be trying to show us a wold stripped of illusion and nicety, but all he ends up showing us is what the world looks like to someone with very little imagination. It's ugly, and perhaps worse, it's prolix.
What do You think about Suttree (1992)?
For a book with little plot and a cipher for a main character, this blew me away. McCarthy continues to make me re-evaluate my opinion of him.Though the characters are well-drawn (even if only sketched at times) and sometimes entertaining (e.g. Harrogate and his bat-holocaust) the real draw of this book is the style. McCarthy does not let up for one damn second. Every single descriptive sentence is impossibly lyrical; every untagged, unattributed line of dialogue is convincing as hell. Why have I never thought to describe rain as 'easy'? Or, let's just do this:"The dirty half flayed pig looked like something recovered from a shallow grave.""Dim scenes pooling in the summer night, wan inkwash of junks tilting against a paper sky, rorschach boatmen poling mutely over a mooncobbled sea.""She [a goat] opened one eye, a cracked agate filled with sly goat sapience.""The water coughed and spattered clots of iron scale into the sink and finally cleared to a silty dun color not unlike the river's...""...dark flowers in the old coalscuttle swayed like paper cobras."That was just from looking at random pages. Those are average McCarthy sentences.Some might call him pretentious, but McCarthy doesn't have to pretend. He is the real deal.
—Drew
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 McCarthyThe 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.comI also have a Facebook blogger page at: https://www.facebook.com/JeffreyKeeten
—Jeffrey Keeten
This book is absolutely beautiful. It holds it's place right behind Gaiman's American Gods as my second favorite novel ever written.Let me explain: When I first read The Road, I immediately fell in love with Cormac McCarthy’s writing style. The absence of quotation marks, the SAT vocabulary, the full-page long comma-less sentences, and vivid imagery, while off-putting to many, for me was the literary equivalent of an orgasm. The story was not what I expected or wanted it to be, but the writing had me wanting more. Suttree gave me the more that I wanted, with plenty of extra goodies piled on to not only make me reconsider my opinions on McCarthy as a novelist, but also to become one of my favorite novels of all time, earning a place in the top three slots. There is not much in the way of story and plot in Suttree, but I find that that is what I enjoy that the most in books. When I go over my favorite novels, the thing they all have in common is their narrative. They all are an account of a character’s life that seem like it could easily go on forever, and in my mind, I want that to happen. I never want these people to go away or their lives to be done when I close the pages of the book. This is how I felt about the “plot” of Suttree.The characters of the novel are what I really loved. There was not one social outcast in the little riverside community that was like another, each one with his own unique life that he lived. They were like real people they were so varied and different, from their looks to their homes to their topics of conversation. The characters became my friends, and while I read, I was convinced they were living, breathing people.Of course, the writing was where McCarthy really showcased his talents as a writer. Suttree had everything that I learned to love that I found in The Road. But in Suttree I encountered something that comes only once every thousand books or so. The description of the scenes and settings in this book were so vivid that in my mind’s eye I saw every last blade of grass, every bead of sweat as though the novel were what I actually saw. For hours at a time I would forget myself and my life as I became immersed in McCarthy’s world; I became the main character of Cornelius Suttree, or Harrogate, or the hobo under the bridge. Often, one of my brothers would come and say, “Brandon, you’ve been in your room for three hours without making a sound, what are you doing in here?”The dialogue was also brilliant. There were no trite or unrealistic lines of dialogue to be found in this book, which only served to further make this world more realistic.This book is one of my favorites, a six star book, but I do not recommend to everyone. This book can only be appreciated by a select few. Those who are willing to look for the diamonds in what appears to be the rough will find what I found: pure bookish bliss. For those who cannot be bothered to look, these riches shall elude you.
—Brandon
