“In my father’s last letter he said that the world is run by those willing to take the responsibility for the running of it. If it is life that you feel you are missing I can tell you where to find it. In the law courts, in business, in government. There is nothing occurring in the streets. Nothing but a dumbshow composed of the helpless and the impotent.”
“Ruder forms survive.”
“That’s where you’re wrong my friend. Everything’s important. A man lives his life, he has to make that important. Whether he’s a small town county sheriff or the president. Or a busted out bum. You might even understand that some day. I don’t say you will. You might.”
It took me quite a while to finish “Suttree,” but that was to be expected, given Cormac McCarthy’s penchant for using sibylline, attenuated, recherche words (see what I did there?). Yet it in this language that he builds the description and atmosphere—with unbelievably powerful similes—that truly set his stories apart. There is a need to read McCarthy slowly, lest you miss some of the nuance he brings; what may look like a throwaway sentence at first glance may reveal a sublime subtlety should give it the time and attention it desires.
Yes, it can make for a difficult read and some self-education on certain aspects of grammar and punctuation, and there is no argument against the fact that McCarthy makes you work for it (personally, I think he uses language as a riddle, mostly to amuse himself) ... but the payoff is always worth the investment with this brilliant writer.
“Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad’s pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop.”
“In these silent sunless galleries he’d come to feel that another went before him and each glade he entered seemed just quit by a figure who’d been sitting there and risen and gone on. Some doublegoer, some othersuttree eluded him in these woods and he feared that should that figure fail to rise and steal away and were he therefore to come to himself in this obscure wood he’d be neither mended nor made whole but rather set mindless to dodder drooling with his ghostly clone from sun to sun across a hostile hemisphere forever.”
“He leaned against the viaduct rail. Spat numbly at the tracks down there. At the dreams implicit in their endless steel reachings.”
“That was in nineteen and thirty-one and if I live to be a hunnerd year old I don’t think I’ll ever see anything as pretty as that train on fire goin up that mountain and around the bend and them flames lightin up the snow and the trees and the night.”
Any difficulties with vocabulary (much of it biblical in nature, offset by some startling instances of obscenity) and difficult pacing are more than offset by the brilliant dialogue. In exchanges with Ab Jones, a goatherder, the Indian, a fisherman and a hunter, the give-and-take is incredibly poignant, revealing and well-done by McCarthy. Among these similes and metaphors, the most obvious is Cornelius Suttree’s life playing out like his workaday fisherman routine—drifting on the river, taken any which way by the current, with no desire for control over his path or destination.
As his life disintegrated, it becomes apparent that it was no accident that Suttree chose to become a fisherman, due to these qualities. Suttree appears to always be chasing a past he can’t catch up to and doesn’t realize he never will. In the meantime, life just happens to him—he doesn’t appear to be an active participant. We are shown over and over that leaving is what Suttree is truly best at, and even when he takes action, such as destroying a cop car, it is really just a benign act of defiance on behalf of a wronged friend.
“His eyes beheld the country he was passing through but did not mark it. 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.”
“Suttree” is dominated by a very melancholy feel overall, punctuated by McCarthy staples: the questioning of the pointlessness and inevitable decline of things. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee—namely, along the Tennessee River—in the early 1950s, the work is dark and overtly pessimistic, occasionally featuring jarring shifts in narrative from third to first person. The pervasive racism (one fellow’s name is actually “Nigger”) can be unsettling, but the themes that truly permeate the book are decay and breakdown. We see that Knoxville’s underbelly is dominated by a community of aimless downtrodden, who are all drawn to each other. McCarthy paints a lecherous and dangerous Knoxville, with evil, sin or both seemingly lurking around every corner. Loneliness dominates, with the weather beginning to match the feeling and tone of the book later on, as Knoxville is beset with a harsh winter and bitter cold.
The bookliner notes that Suttree comes from a prominent family, but I didn’t quite get that from the book. However, we are told that Suttree disappoints his father by marrying a common housekeeper, which sets the direction for what his life would become. The absent father leads the reader to wonder whether Suttree views the ragman as a father figure, a representation of the father-son relationship that he is missing. The ragpicker is also the focal point of Suttree’s occasional self-righteousness, even in the face of his own dreams in which he is put on trial for living below his station.
“You have no right to represent people this way, he said. A man is all men. You have no right to your wretchedness.”
Suttree also appears to be haunted in many ways by the specter of the twin who died at childbirth, unable to bear up under the pressure of earning the life that his twin’s death enabled. The terms “antisuttree” and “othersuttree” are used to describe the double nature of Suttree’s life in the book. The words point up the idea that Suttree doesn’t exactly know who he is, and is trying to live a second life in part to make up for the loss of his twin.
When his own child dies unexpectedly well into the book, a door is opened into Suttree’s dark past, but more questions arise then answers given: What did he do to engender such hate from his in-laws and former community? What happened to his marriage? What did his going to university have to do with any of it?
Suddenly and out of nowhere, we are introduced to the one-of-a-kind Gene “Countrymouse” Harrogate, a difficult-to-like 18-year-old who eventually finds his way into Knoxville’s criminal class by way of, well, banging watermelons (leading McCarthy to refer to him as the “moonlight melonmounter”). As his naivete is exposed in nearly every way possible in the prison, he comes across Suttree, who can’t help but take the innocent (in every way except for criminally) youngster under his wing. Exactly what Suttree did to land in the workhouse for seven months is never exactly shared, but it’s not hard to understand that he has been swept away by the wrong crowd, and that he was probably left there after their tide receded.
Though he can plainly see Harrogate’s imminent demise unfolding in slow-motion, Suttree is powerful to stop it, despite many warnings and offers of help. As the story progresses, we wonder whether Suttree is supposed to be a father or brother figure to Gene—his main feeling toward him appears to be pity, yet he can’t resist him and he looks out for Harrogate in what could be construed as a brotherly way.
Harrogate, referred to aptly as a “white boychild,” comes in and out of the story at various times throughout the book, with many of his escapades marked by the killing or torturing of animals (including one scene nearly straight out of “Lord of the Flies”). His grandiose ideas to rip off payphones, tunnel under the city to dynamite his way into a bank, kill rabid bats for money and others belie the dismal, sad and despairing state of Harrogate’s life. We are even left to wonder at one point whether Harrogate is the serial killer that is wandering around Knoxville, but as suddenly as he entered the tale, he leaves it, having been caught and sent off to prison again.
Increasingly, Suttree begins to take on Harrogate-like qualities, until we are faced with the truth that he isn’t much better than Gene after all. When Suttree comes into $300 due to his uncle dying, he burns through the money in no time, attempting to chase the maxim that if you look good, you feel good, dressing himself up in nifty threads—but the end result is akin to putting lipstick on a pig. As a blackout drunk, he never learns, bringing out an anger and frustration within the reader who has to live through it with Suttree.
For much of book, we are forced to ponder Suttree’s mental state. Even from early stages of the book, the reader is faced with contemplating whether Suttree is going crazy, and whether the tale is comprised of our acceptance that we are witness to the slow dissipation of sanity in our main character and narrator. At one point, we speculate whether he is brain-damaged as the result of a horrific fight that left him nigh-on death. Also, mental illness would appear to be a part of his family (hell, when your sister mistakes your dead twin as a babydoll, how does one overcome such a thing?!). His journey into nature feels like a bit of a bad trip (talking to trees, seeing elves, living through vivid daytime dreams), and his attempts to go sober appear to speed his descent into madness. Wandering through the Tennessee mountains and wilderness, crossing over into North Carolina, Suttree is forced to come to terms with his own loneliness and the empty path of his life.
Somewhat unexpectedly, McCarthy mixes in a lot of humor in this novel, making this a much funnier read than his other works. Great nicknames, hilarious imagery, depictions of truly epic benders and turns of phrase such as “crotch crickets” brought out needed laughs amidst the overwhelmingly depressing qualities that overhang the book. Here’s a small sampling:
“I think you better put it down before it puts you down. You’ll find your liver in your sock some morning.”
“Makes your liver quiver.”
“This son of a bitch drives like a drunk indian goin after more whiskey.”
“An enormous fart ripped through the lunchroom, stilling the muted noontime clink of cutlery and cup clatter, stunning the patrons, rattling the café to silence … J-Bone, in the booth alone, wrinkled his face. After a minute he climbed out onto the aisle. Lordy, he said. I don’t believe I can stand it my ownself.”
“The sun like a bunghole to a greater hell beyond.”
“Hell fire, son, you aint never heard a snore. I’ll put my old lady up against any three humans or one moose.”
Suttree’s relationship with religion appears to be a major feature of the plot as well. After a particularly sinister activity involving dumping a dead body into the river, he is propelled back to church, with many intimations that he was raised to be God-fearing—even that he was an alterboy. This imagery is countered by Suttree’s fascination with the dark arts practiced by an old “nigger witch,” who he visits multiple times under the guise of helping others, but with the pull really being that he is searching for meaning to his existence, any compelling reason to go on. McCarthy also repeats imagery about a “quaking sky,” describing it as a hellish void over and over again.
“No one wants to die.
“Shit, said the ragpicker. Here’s one that sick of livin.
“Would you give all you own?
“The ragman eyed him suspiciously but he did not smile. It wont be long, he said. An old man’s days are hours.
“And what happens then?
“When?
“After you’re dead.
“Don’t nothin happen. You’re dead.
“You told me once you believed in God.
“The old man waved his hand. Maybe, he said. I got not reason to think he believes in me. Oh I’d like to see him for a minute if I could.
“What would you say to him?
“Well, I think I’d just tell him. I’d say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there’s just one thing I’d like to know. And he’ll say: What’s that? And then I’m goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldn’t put any part of it together.
“Suttree smiled. What do you think he’ll say?
“The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I don’t believe he can answer it, he said. I don’t believe there is a answer.”
I also felt that McCarthy purposely added some ambiguity to Suttree’s sexuality. He appears asexual at times, homosexual at times and fiercely heterosexual at others. In the two meaningful relationships he has with females in the book, he leaves one, Wanda, after a tragic landslide that kills her, leaving us to wonder what he might have done to help; in the other, he enters into a tremendously confusing and odd arrangement with a prostitute, Joyce. In the latter relationship, he expresses no feelings and the narrator offers no insights into Suttree’s detachment or emotions. There is also a sexual morbidity to his dealings with the old seer, especially when he is raped by her in a dreamstate.
The New York Times described the book as a “doomed Huckleberry Finn,” and I found myself wondering at the end whether it was actually a treatise on determinism, loneliness and death. Hanging above all of Suttree’s relationships is the reality of his searing loneliness, no matter how invested or involved he may be with another human being at the time.
“She had knelt beside him and nibbled at his ear. Her soft breast against his arm. Why then this loneliness?”
“She was shouting at him some half drunken imprecations, all he could make out was his name. He seemed to have heard it all before and he kept on going.”
“My life is ghastly, he told the grass.”
“I have a thing to tell you. I know all souls are one and all souls lonely.”
Suttree feels cursed by fate and constantly pursued by death, so it’s natural that the themes of destiny and fate are so prevalent throughout the tale. It also helps to explain why he is so drawn to and dominated by tragedies. Besides the rock slide, he sits down at another point to watch a building burn to the ground, and McCarthy’s prose itself is rampant with allusions to fate and destiny:
“He looked at the gray sky but it did not change and the river was always the same.”
“He was seized with a thing he’d never known, a sudden understanding of the mathematical certainy of death. He felt his heart pumping down there under the palm of his hand. Who tells it so? Could a whole man not author his own death with a thought? Shut down the ventricle like the closing of an eye?”
“But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse, only Suttree didn’t say so.”
“Curious the small and lesser fates that join to lead a man to this.”
“How’d it start?
“Suttree looked down. A little man was leaning to him with the question.
“I don’t know, said Suttree. How all things start.”
“Suttree among others, sad children of the fates whose home is the world, all gathered here a little while to forestall the going there.”
“Merceline Essary that they said would not never walk on this earth again by men was doctors come under me and I rewalked her in three days. She originally died in October of last year and she walked to that day.
“I can walk, said Suttree.
“You can walk, she said. But you caint see where you goin.
“Can you?
“To know what will come is the same as to make it so.”
Suttree conducts a very revealing and telling self-interview upon returning to the river late in the book. The scene is so poignant that, in my opinion, the book really could have ended at that point, with the chapter ending with seeing him “passing under the bridge.”
In what serves as the proverbial last straw, he makes a miraculous recovery from typhoid fever and escapes the hospital, only to find that his home has been long inhabited by a rotting corpse. After he decides to leave Knoxville for good, in the final scene, Suttree encounters an angelic boy ladling out water to parched road workers, and he eventually offers the spoon to Suttree, who recognizes a younger version of himself in the lad. Yet we are still left to ponder whether he finally has any self-awareness at the end, or whether he will go on blaming Tennessee and the river for his problems.
“God must have been watching over you. You very nearly died.
“You would not believe what watches.
“Oh?
“He is not a thing. Nothing ever stops moving.
“Is that what you learned?
“I learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only.
“I see, said the priest.
“Suttree shook his head. No, he said. You don’t.”
In the spirit of honesty, I have to share that this was the least favorite of the McCarthy books I’ve read thus far, paling in comparison to “The Road” and “Blood Meridian.” That being said, I appreciated the different style of writing, the ability to shift prose, a quality I’ve long admired in proven, brilliant authors. I was glad to see McCarthy’s willingness to incorporate humor into his writing, which he pulled off well.
And though I do slot this piece behind some of the iconic works of McCarthy’s stellar career, it comfortably resides as yet another tremendous example of novel writing from an American treasure.
“You’re not the only one that’s right.
“The ragman looked up warily.
“We’re all right, said Suttree.
“We’re all fucked, said the ragman.”
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