Suttree

Last updated
Suttree
Suttree - Cormac McCarthy.jpg
First edition
Author Cormac McCarthy
LanguageEnglish
Genre Autofiction
Set in1950s Knoxville, Tennessee
Publisher Random House
Publication date
May 1979
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (hardcover)
Pages471 (paperback)
ISBN 0-679-73632-8
OCLC 26322333

Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1979. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, over a four-year period starting in 1950, the novel follows Cornelius Suttree, who has repudiated his former life of privilege to become a fisherman on the Tennessee River.

Contents

The novel has a fragmented structure with many flashbacks and shifts in grammatical person. Suttree has been compared [1] to James Joyce's Ulysses and John Steinbeck's Cannery Row , and called "a doomed Huckleberry Finn " [2] by Jerome 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.

Plot summary

The novel begins with Suttree observing police as they pull a suicide victim from the river. Suttree is living alone in a houseboat, on the fringes of society on the Tennessee River, earning money by fishing for the occasional catfish. He has left a life of luxury, rejecting his parents' influence, and abandoning his wife and young son.

Bridges over the Tennessee River that are featured in Suttree. Knoxville bridges.jpg
Bridges over the Tennessee River that are featured in Suttree.

A large cast of characters, largely composed of misfits and grotesques, 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 to be in 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 a bounty on them, and using dynamite in an attempt to tunnel underneath the city and burgle the treasury. Other prominent characters are prostitutes, hermits, alcoholics, and an aged Geechee 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 with typhoid fever and suffers a lengthy hallucination. 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.

Reception

Novelist Nelson Algren argued that the novel was "a memorable American comedy by an original storyteller." [4] Reviews by writers and literary critics such as Anatole Broyard, [5] Jerome Charyn, [6] Guy Davenport, [7] and Shelby Foote [8] 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." [9] The 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." [10] Late in life, after losing his ability to eat and drink, film critic Roger Ebert wrote, "I began to live through this desperate man's sad life." [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cormac McCarthy</span> American writer (1933–2023)

Cormac McCarthy was an American writer who authored twelve novels, two plays, five screenplays, and three short stories, spanning the Western and postapocalyptic genres. His works often include graphic depictions of violence, and his writing style is characterised by a sparse use of punctuation and attribution. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest American novelists.

<i>Blood Meridian</i> 1985 epic historical novel by Cormac McCarthy

Blood Meridian; or, The Evening Redness in the West is a 1985 epic historical novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, classified under the Western, or sometimes the anti-Western, genre. McCarthy's fifth book, it was published by Random House.

<i>The Orchard Keeper</i> 1965 novel by Cormac McCarthy

The Orchard Keeper is the first novel by the American novelist Cormac McCarthy. It won the 1966 William Faulkner Foundation Award for notable first novel.

<i>Outer Dark</i> Novel by Cormac McCarthy

Outer Dark is the second novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy, published in 1968. The time and setting are nebulous, but can be assumed to be somewhere in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the twentieth century. The novel tells of a woman named Rinthy who bears her brother's baby. The brother, Culla, leaves the nameless infant in the woods to die, but tells his sister that the newborn died of natural causes and had to be buried. Rinthy discovers this lie and sets out to find the baby for herself.

<i>Child of God</i> 1973 novel by Cormac McCarthy

Child of God (1973) is the third novel by American author Cormac McCarthy. It depicts the life of a violent outcast and serial killer in 1960s Appalachian Tennessee.

<i>The Crossing</i> (McCarthy novel) 1994 novel by Cormac McCarthy

The Crossing is a novel by American author Cormac McCarthy, published in 1994 by Alfred A. Knopf. The book is the second installment of McCarthy's "Border Trilogy," following the award-winning All the Pretty Horses (1992), to which The Crossing has been both favorably and unfavorably compared.

Miller's Department Store was a chain of department stores based in East Tennessee.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jerome Charyn</span> American writer (born 1937)

Jerome Charyn is an American writer. With nearly 50 published works over a 50-year span, Charyn has a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life, writing in multiple genres.

<i>The Road</i> 2006 novel by Cormac McCarthy

The Road is a 2006 post-apocalyptic novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy. The book details the grueling journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months across a landscape blasted by an unspecified cataclysm that has destroyed industrial civilization and almost all life. The novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. The book was adapted into a film of the same name in 2009, directed by John Hillcoat.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Old City, Knoxville</span> United States historic place

The Old City is a neighborhood in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States, located at the northeast corner of the city's downtown area. Originally part of a raucous and vice-ridden section of town known as "The Bowery," the Old City has since been revitalized through extensive redevelopment efforts carried out during the 1980s through the present. Currently, the Old City is an offbeat urban neighborhood, home to several unique restaurants, bars, clubs, and shops.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Knox County Courthouse (Tennessee)</span> United States historic place

The Knox County Courthouse is a historic building located at 300 Main Street in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States. Built in 1886, it served as Knox County's courthouse until the completion of the City-County Building in 1980, and continues to house offices for several county departments. John Sevier, Tennessee's first governor, is buried on the courthouse lawn. The courthouse is listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its architecture and its role in the county's political history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Omni Grove Park Inn</span> United States historic place

The Omni Grove Park is a historical resort hotel on the western-facing slope of Sunset Mountain within the Blue Ridge Mountains, in Asheville, North Carolina. This hotel was visited by various Presidents of the United States mentioned below.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Gay Street (Knoxville)</span> United States historic place

Gay Street is a street in Knoxville, Tennessee, United States, that traverses the heart of the city's downtown area. Since its development in the 1790s, Gay Street has served as the city's principal financial and commercial thoroughfare, and has played a primary role in the city's historical and cultural development. The street contains Knoxville's largest office buildings and oldest commercial structures. Several buildings on Gay Street have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Peter Josyph</span> American artist, author, filmmaker

Peter Josyph is a New York artist who works concurrently as an author, a painter, an actor-director, a filmmaker, and a photographer.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Randolph Neal Jr.</span> American lawyer

John Randolph Neal Jr. was an American attorney, law professor, politician, and activist, best known for his role as chief counsel during the 1925 Scopes Trial, and as an advocate for the establishment of the Tennessee Valley Authority in the 1920s and 1930s. He also taught law at the University of Denver and the University of Tennessee, and served in the Tennessee state legislature. He was a candidate for governor or senator numerous times between 1912 and 1954.

<i>Child of God</i> (film) 2013 film

Child of God is a 2013 American crime drama film co-written and directed by James Franco, and starring Scott Haze, based on the novel of the same name by Cormac McCarthy. It was selected to be screened in the official competition at the 70th Venice International Film Festival and was an official selection of the 2013 Toronto International Film Festival. The film made its United States premiere at the 51st New York Film Festival and then was screened at the 2013 Austin Film Festival.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cormac McCarthy bibliography</span>

A list of works by or about Cormac McCarthy, the American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. McCarthy published twelve novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and post-apocalyptic genres, as well as multiple short-stories, screenplays, plays, and an essay.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">The Kekulé Problem</span> Essay by Cormac McCarthy

"The Kekulé Problem" is a 2017 essay written by the American author Cormac McCarthy for the Santa Fe Institute (SFI). It was McCarthy's first published work of non-fiction. The science magazine Nautilus first ran the article online on April 20, 2017, then printed it as the cover story for an issue on the subject of consciousness. David Krakauer, an American evolutionary biologist who had known McCarthy for two decades, wrote a brief introduction. Don Kilpatrick III provided illustrations.

<i>The Passenger</i> (McCarthy novel) 2022 novel by Cormac McCarthy

The Passenger is a 2022 novel by the American writer Cormac McCarthy. It was released six weeks before its companion novel Stella Maris. The plot of both The Passenger and Stella Maris follows Bobby and Alicia Western, two siblings whose father helped develop the atomic bomb.

<i>The Cormac McCarthy Journal</i> Academic journal

The Cormac McCarthy Journal is a biannual peer-reviewed academic journal of literary criticism dedicated to the study of the American author Cormac McCarthy (1933–2023). The journal launched in 2001 as an annual publication of the Cormac McCarthy Society. Since 2015, issues are published on a biannual basis by the Penn State University Press.

References

  1. "The New York Times: Book Review Search Article". archive.nytimes.com. Retrieved 2021-05-11.
  2. "Suttree". archive.nytimes.com.
  3. "Cormac McCarthy Papers". www.thewittliffcollections.txstate.edu. July 7, 2020.
  4. In Chicago Tribune Book World, January 28, 1979.
  5. New York Times, January 20, 1979
  6. New York Times, February 18, 1979
  7. National Review, March 16, 1979
  8. Memphis Press-Scimitar, February 17, 1979
  9. Hislop, Andrew, TLS, no. 4490 (21–27 April 1989), p. 436.
  10. Backcover blurb of 1979 USA first edition.
  11. Ebert, Roger (24 October 2008). "I think I'm musing my mind".