I’ve been on a Cormac McCarthy binge in the past few months, having read Blood Meridian (his most celebrated work, and probably his best), and also having finished his most recently-published books, the literary duet of The Passenger and Stella Maris. These books, like the rest of Cormac McCarthy’s oeuvre, carry within them a heady concoction of stoic characters, cinematic vistas, Faulknerian complexity, biblical cadences, and elemental violence. So, I suppose it was natural that I would move on next to reading Suttree.
Some of his fans think of Suttree as his best work. I would probably beg to differ, but Suttree is certainly McCarthy’s funniest book that I have read so far, and probably the most merciless in the way that McCarthy puts his main character through the most harrowing episodes: that bit with typhoid fever had me shaking my head in pity and disbelief.
Suttree tells of the adventures and travails of Cornelius Suttree, who makes a living as a fisherman on the outskirts of Knoxville, Tennessee. Throughout the novel, Suttree makes his way through life amidst poverty and squalor, as we meet the vagabonds, ne’er-do-wells and po’ folk that make up his community. The writer hints at an educated man who chooses this hard life, descending down into the Hades of the American South to swim with the flotsam and jetsam of humanity. He makes many bad choices, but is ultimately saved by the constancy with which he keeps faith with the friends that he surrounds himself with, and the wry amusement with which he views the world and its happenings .
As always with McCarthy, the joy is in his inimitable style of writing: frequently cinematic, sometimes ethereal, often garrulous, and never shrinking from the bare-knuckled truths of human existence.
It is often said that Suttree is the most autobiographical of his novels, and I can only surmise, after having read Suttree, that most of this book must have been written from personal experience, for it to be so searing and achingly painful. The violence and drama is often leavened by humour – mainly from the capers of the memorable Harrogate – but for the most part, this is not a book to be read while you are holidaying by the beach.
I would give this book a 4-star rating: the writing is muscular and also beautiful in the way that only Cormac McCarthy can make it, but also painfully merciless, that by the end, the reader is almost glad that Suttree’s suffering would hopefully come to an end.