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| Author | Cormac McCarthy |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Autofiction |
| Set in | 1950sKnoxville, Tennessee |
| Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | May 1979 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 471 (paperback) |
| ISBN | 0-679-73632-8 |
| OCLC | 26322333 |
Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel byCormac McCarthy, published in 1979. Set inKnoxville, Tennessee, over a four-year period starting in 1950, the novel follows Cornelius Suttree, who has repudiated his former life of privilege to become afisherman on theTennessee River.
The novel has a fragmented structure with manyflashbacks and shifts ingrammatical person.Suttree has been compared[1] toJames Joyce'sUlysses andJohn Steinbeck'sCannery Row, and called "a doomedHuckleberry Finn"[2] byJerome Charyn.Suttree was written over a 20-year span[3] and is a departure from McCarthy's previous novels, being much longer, more sprawling in structure, and perhaps his most humorous.
The novel begins with Suttree observing police pull a suicide victim from the river. Suttree lives alone in a houseboat, on the fringes of society on the Tennessee River, earning money by fishing for the occasionalcatfish. He has left a life of luxury, rejecting his parents' influence, and abandoned his wife and young son.
A large cast of characters, largely composed ofmisfits andgrotesques, is introduced, one of which is a dimwitted young man named Gene Harrogate, whom Suttree meets during a short stint in a work camp-style prison. Harrogate was sent to prison after being caught "violating" a farmer's watermelons. Suttree attempts to help Harrogate stay out of trouble after he is released, but this task proves vain as Harrogate sets off on a series of misadventures, including using poisoned meat and a slingshot to kill bats ("flitter-mice" as Harrogate calls them) to earn abounty on them, and using dynamite in an attempt to tunnel underneath the city and burgle thetreasury. Other prominent characters are prostitutes, hermits, alcoholics, and an agedGeechee witch.
His relationships with women all come to bad ends. One prostitute-girlfriend terminates the relationship in a moment of madness, smashing up the inside of their new car. He becomes involved with a teenage girl from a destitute family, but awakens in the night to find her crushed to death by a landslide that falls on their homeless encampment. Prior to the beginning of the book, Suttree was also married to a woman he apparently met at university. He left his wife with a young son, who dies of an illness early on in the book. He watches the funeral from afar, and proceeds to bury the boy alone once the other mourners leave.
Towards the novel's end, Suttree falls ill withtyphoid fever and suffers a lengthyhallucination. This occurs after a black friend of Suttree is killed in a fight with the police and Harrogate is arrested in a failed robbery attempt. In the end, he feels his identity as an individual is affirmed by his time living in destitution, and he leaves Knoxville, seeking a new life.
NovelistNelson Algren argued that the novel was "a memorable American comedy by an original storyteller."[4] Reviews by writers and literary critics such asAnatole Broyard,[5]Jerome Charyn,[6]Guy Davenport,[7] andShelby Foote[8] were followed by theTimes Literary Supplement review which saw the novel as "Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent ofFlannery O'Connor."[9] The profile writer and music journalistStanley Booth observed thatSuttree was "probably the funniest and most unbearably sad of McCarthy's books...which seem to me unsurpassed in American literature."[10] Late in life, film criticRoger Ebert wrote, "I began to live through this desperate man's sad life."[11]
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