Suttree
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| Suttree | |
| Author | Cormac McCarthy |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Semi-Autobiographical novel |
| Publisher | Vintage International |
| Publication date | May, 1979 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0679736328 |
Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1979.
Set in 1951 in Knoxville, Tennessee, the novel follows Cornelius Suttree, who has repudiated his former life of privilege to become a fisherman on the Tennessee River.
The novel has a fragmented structure with many flashbacks and shifts in grammatical person. Suttree has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn.
Suttree was written over a 30 year span and is a departure from his previous novels, being much longer, more sprawling in structure, and perhaps McCarthy's most humorous novel.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
The novel begins with Suttree observing police as they pull a man who committed suicide from the river. Suttree is living alone in a house-boat, on the fringes of society on the Tennessee River. Suttree earns money by fishing for the occasional catfish. He has left a life of luxury, rejecting his father and family, and abandoning his wife and son.
A large cast of characters, largely misfits and grotesques, are introduced; The most endearing being Gene Harrogate, whom Suttree meets in a work camp. Harrogate was sent to the work camp for having sex with a farmer's watermelons. Suttree attempts to take Harrogate under his wing once out of the work camp; however this task proves fruitless as Harrogate sets off on a series of misadventures such as using poisoned meat and a slingshot in order to kill bats (or "flitter-mice" as Gene calls them) to earn a bounty on them, and using dynamite to attempt to tunnel underneath the city. Other prominent characters are prostitutes, hermits, and an aged Geechee witch.
His relationships with women end badly both times. One prostitute girlfriend terminates the relationship in a moment of madness, smashing up the inside of their new car. The other woman he is involved with is killed by a landslide on the river bank.
Towards the novel's end, Suttree falls ill and suffers a lengthy hallucination. In the end, he feels his identity is reaffirmed, and he leaves Knoxville.
[edit] Reception
Novelist Nelson Algren argued that the novel was “a memorable American comedy by an original storyteller.” [1] Estimable reviews by such noted writers and literary critics as Anatole Broyard [2], Jerome Charyn, [3], Guy Davenport ([4], and Shelby Foote [5] were followed by the Times Literary Supplement review which saw the novel as “Faulknerian in its gentle wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor.” [6] Influential profile writer and music journalist, Stanley Booth, observed that Suttree was “probably the funniest and most unbearably sad of McCarthy’s books... which seem to me unsurpassed in American literature.” [7]. On the anecdotal level, film critic Roger Ebert wrote that he had read all of McCarthy's novels, and Suttree was his favorite.
[edit] Notes
[edit] External links
- William Gillespie, "Sure Do Wish You’d Get Ye One of These Here Taters: An Essay on Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree"
- "Searching for Suttree", by Wes Morgan (2004); photographs of some of the Knoxville locations featured in Suttree
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