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    Suttree
    Suttree
    Suttree
    Ebook681 pages10 hours

    Suttree

    By Cormac McCarthy

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    From the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road, here is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville.

    Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there—a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters—he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.

    Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateAug 11, 2010
    ISBN9780307762474
    Author

    Cormac McCarthy

    Cormac McCarthy was the author of many acclaimed novels, including Blood Meridian, Child of God and The Passenger. Among his honours are the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His works adapted to film include All the Pretty Horses, The Road and No Country for Old Men – the latter film receiving four Academy Awards, including the award for Best Picture. McCarthy died in 2023 in Santa Fe, NM at the age of 89.

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    Reviews for Suttree

    4/5

    616 ratings27 reviews

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    • 4/5
      A tale of life on the margins of society and life itself. The vocabulary alone makes it worth a read.
    • 5/5
      Like Leopold Bloom in Knoxville, the protagnoist Suttree, who seems to have grown up in better circumstances, has episodic adventures and encounters with the common people of Eastern Tennessee. McCarthy alternates his stripped down punctuation-less dialogue and detailed listing of simple actions with rich prose poetry that is often describing offal, vermin, decadence, the inebriated and death. All in all, it’s fascinating, inspired and brilliant. McCarthy seems to either understand his talents unusually well or he is very fortunate that his writing style fits and complements his interests perfectly. I must read his earlier novels.
      —————
      I’d rather make no negative comment, but in his interview with Oprah, McCarthy mentioned his dislike of dialogue punctuation (stating that there was no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks) and at least one reviewer has stated that there is never any problem with attribution in McCarthy’s work.
      Well…yes there is. I often have to re-read his dialogue to see who is saying what, and that is what the punctuation is for.
    • 4/5
      “He lay down in his blankets. It was growing dark, long late mid-summer twilight in the woods. He wanted to go down to the river to bathe but he felt too bad. He turned over and looked at the small plot of ground in the crook of his arm. My life is ghastly, he told the grass.”

      Set in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the early to mid-1950s, this book tells the story of six years in the life of “Bud” Suttree, a man who has left his wife and child to live on a houseboat on the edges of society. He ekes out a living as a fisherman.

      It is a sprawling, fragmented narrative, filled with outcasts and misfits. A vast number of characters are mentioned, some for a single appearance, and others winding in and out, such as the goatman, the ragpicker, the street evangelist, and various prostitutes. There is no plot. It is about events and people in Suttree’s life. It is about time, life, and death. It explores the concepts of being and nothingness.

      “How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”

      It is expressively written in long elaborate sentences and short irreverent dialogue. It is occasionally difficult to understand the characters’ motivations – perhaps just they are just doing their best to survive. The tone is dark. Unfortunate things happen to people who are already down on their luck. It is a lengthy book, so after a while, a series of one unhappy event after another gets to be a little depressing, but the writing is superb.

      “Suttree stood among the screaming leaves and called the lightning down. It cracked and boomed about and he pointed out the darkened heart within him and cried for light. If there be any art in the weathers of this earth. Or char these bones to coal. If you can, if you can. A blackened rag in the rain.”
    • 4/5
      Suttree has three flaws, one of too few will care about in this century, one of which too many people will care about for the wrong reasons, and one of which just enough people will care about.

      Nobody will care that there is absolutely no development in this book whatsoever. Lay aside the idea that a book must have a plot or character development, fine, but books should develop in some way. This book does not. Nobody will care, because it's very cool to think that books can just be lumps of prose. This is sad.

      Too many people will care about the depictions of women and other minorities. Spoiler: they are not all sweetness and light. Suttree is a horrifically violent book, and the violence is not placed in any narrative or developmental context, as it is in his other books. It's just there. Many readers will find this grotesque, disturbing, immoral, and/or oppressive--too many. It is grotesque, disturbing, and amoral, but it's also universal. The book does no favors to its female, gay, or black characters (the lone native American comes off quite well), but that is because that is how those people experience life. Of course, such an argument can only go so far, and some of the scenes do verge on violence-porn. That is a flaw.

      Just enough people will care about the absurd chest-thumping of the opening fifty or so pages, during which McCarthy pulls out words that, if not hapax legomena, are pretty darn close, and packs them in pretty tight--sometimes four or five to a sentence. This is also a flaw. McCarthy's prose is already begging to be parodied (I love it, but still), and this doesn't help anyone.

      All that said, this is the purest expression of McCarthy's work as prose-writer. On a sentence to sentence level (after the first few score, at least), it's as glorious as anything ever written by an American. It's also hilarious, which is unexpected. A great way for him to say goodbye to the south-east.
    • 5/5
      Out-Faulkners Faulkner. Brilliant.
    • 5/5
      This is one of My All-Time Favorite Reads. A modern masterpiece.
    • 5/5
      Suttree. Wow. It took three attempts before the book clicked with me enough to finish. Even when it finally did click, reading it was slow going and, at times, almost painful. I had to look up definitions for at least one word/page, and often my dictionary didn't recognize the word, necessitating a google search. Most of the time I had no idea what was going on in the story.

      All that said, I absolutely loved it. Cormac McCarthy is a mad-genius wordsmith. It was often hard to focus on the story because I was so distracted by his word choices. Generally that's a deal killer for me, but in this case, I was continually in awe.

      I'm excited to have discovered McCarthy so late in his career. It's like discovering a no-longer-aired tv series that you can watch all at once without having to wait for new episodes or seasons. Sort of.
    • 5/5
      The city is Knoxville, the river is the Tennessee, and the story is about Cornelius Suttree. Suttree is a fisherman who lives on and off the river. We meet him as he lays prone "With his jaw cradled in the crook of his arm" as he "watched idly surface phenomena, gouts of sewage faintly working, gray clots of nameless waste and yellow condoms roiling slowly out of the murk like some giant form of fluke or tapeworm."(p 7) This is the milieu of Suttree and he does not stray from it very far throughout his picaresque journey chronicled in Cormac McCarthy's fine novel. His city is made of a "Curious marble architecture, stele and obelisk and cross and little rainworn stones where names grow dim with years."(p 3) His world is "a world within the world . In these alien reaches these maugre sinks and interstitial wastes that the righteous see from carriage and car another life dreams."(p 4)

      As the novel opens Suttree, who comes from a prominent family, has abandoned his wife and infant son and has chosen to live on a houseboat near McAnally Flats, among the drifters and derelicts of the town. He keeps himself alive by fishing in the filth of the Tennessee River, but his existence is apparently meaningless, given over to destructive drinking, fighting, and carousing. As the narrator explains in the introduction to the story,
      “We are come to a world within the world. In these alien reaches, these maugre sinks and interstitial wastes that the righteous see from carriage and car another life dreams. Ill-shapen or black or deranged, fugitive of all order, strangers in everyland.”(p 4)
      Suttree has been accepted as part of this other world. He shares bottles, stories, and jail cells with the “ruder forms” that inhabit the region. They recognize that Suttree is different, has had opportunities denied them, but they never question his decision to live among them. To them, he is simply “old Sut.”

      The reader follows him through apparently random experiences. The book is thus constructed in episodic fashion and depends on the cumulative effect of these episodes to develop its structure and identify its theme. Some characters come and go, touching Suttree only for the moment. Others, however, form a constant in his life, forcing him to come out of his self-imposed isolation and renew, in however meager a fashion, his connections with humanity. The themes hold the book together as they recur from time to time. Most prominent among these is McCarthy's ability to use his Faulknerian prose to capture the essence of death. The book opens with a horrifying realistic scene of a suicide in the river - "as Suttree passed he noticed with a feeling he could not name that the dead man's watch was still running."(p 10) This reminder that 'life goes on' will be brought home again as Suttree passes through the "alien reaches" that he inhabits. In a later scene as he visits a cemetery he sees an old vault that nature as begun to dismantle. "Inside there is nothing. No bones, no dust. How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it."(p 153)

      Although the book is large and its contents rich and varied, several episodes do stand out as significant events in the sweep of Suttree’s life. While in prison for having taken part, unintentionally, in a robbery, Suttree meets Gene Harrogate, a foolish country boy who later follows Suttree back to Knoxville to become part of the marginal world of the outcasts. Although Suttree tries to avoid being involved with Harrogate, he often finds himself drawn into the boy’s irrational schemes, and on occasion has to rescue the boy. A couple of these scenes provide a broad sort of humor that I have not encountered in McCarthy's other novels. Other characters also place demands on Suttree’s humanity despite his best attempts to deny them, and he forms special relationships with a number of the doomed inhabitants of the region. Among them are Ab Jones, a giant black man who fights constantly with the police; an old ragpicker, whose wisdom and stoicism Suttree admires; the Indian named Michael, who offers Suttree a quiet and dignified friendship; and the pathetic catamite Leonard, who involves Suttree in a grotesque scheme to dispose of the decaying body of Leonard’s long-dead father. The longest episode in the book tells the story of a man named Reese and his bizarre family of shellfishermen who entice Suttree, despite his better judgment, away from Knoxville to the French Broad River with the promise of pearls and adventure.

      This is a mighty epic in a modern sense and I recommend it to all readers who want to challenge their perspective through a visit to the "alien reaches" seldom seen from the comfort of their reading rooms.
    • 5/5
      Re-read. Laugh out loud funny when not crushingly tragic. G-d d--n, Cornelius.
    • 2/5
      I am not quite sure what to make of this book.

      In between layers of confusing prose, there are bits and pieces of brilliant writing. I suppose if you have the energy to keep a thesaurus or dictionary by your side to look up the meaning of all the words McCarthy uses, you'll do all right and maybe even love the story. Considering it has a rating of 4.2, some do love it.

      Me? I did not love it. I don't like struggling to understand what an author is trying to say. When I read I want to be entertained and I usually read to relax. Often I felt frustrated more than anything, although there were moments when I laughed at the antics of one of the more lively characters, Gene Harrogate, a.k.a City Mouse or City Rat - it seemed interchangeable.

      I tackled SUTTREE because I read CHILD OF GOD, and despite the need to get "used to" McCarthy's style of writing, and the subject matter, I loved CHILD. I suppose the first sentence of SUTTREE should have been a warning. Others have quoted it, but just in case you missed it:

      "Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and the homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you."

      So, I get it. He (Suttree) is walking the city streets alone, early morning. He sees a cat. He sees homeless people here and there. Fine. But, that gives you a good idea, as the first sentence in the Prologue, of just what you're in for if you decide to read on.

      Let's move on to the first sentence of what we can consider Chapter One (no Chapters are identified) as the book begins:

      "Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blade of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes, where motes sifted and spun."

      That begins the story of Cornelius Suttree, bum/alcoholic extraordinaire. From the back of the book we understand he's shunned his rich upbringing to live among the rabble rousers of Knoxville Tennessee, and ekes out a living running his little trot lines, making just enough selling carp and catfish to hear the jingle of coins in his pockets and keep from starving. If it hadn't been for this brief explanation of what the story was about, I think I'd have been more lost than him.

      Aside from McCarthy's EXTENSIVE knowledge of words - some I've never laid eyes on, he also breaks rules a lesser writer like me must use. No quotations when people speak. (in an interview he said they weren't necessary. I beg to differ - at least in this book) Very little comma usage, etc. Ho boy.

      He also has a tendency to take common, everyday words and run them together, so at first glance it makes you back up, only to realize it's just two basic words strung together. Some are in the quoted sentences above.

      More examples:
      ragestrangled
      sealedbeam
      churchclothes
      graylooking

      And on and on.

      The book is filled with nicknames for the other characters, like Oceanfrog, Trippin Through The Dew, Gatemouth, Jabbo, J Bone, Bucket, Boneyard, to name a few.

      There were parts where I felt physically ill at his descriptions of Suttree being sick from too much alcohol, being urinated on, and the illnesses he contracted, like typhoid fever.

      I happily made it to the end. The book delivered on it's ability to confuse me right on up to the last page. Here is the last sentence - which, trust me, contains no spoiler:

      "I have seen them in a dream, slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them."

      And there you have it. I guess this would be one of those times when you either love it or hate it. I can't say I hated it..., but I'm glad I've finished it.
    • 4/5
      Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight?
      They’d listen to my death.
      No final word?
      Last words are only words.

      I keep trying to think of things to say about this novel, about what it’s about and what it means, and I find myself so inadequately prepared for the task that I simply just want to drop random quotes here and let the words speak for themselves. I’m sure you would understand, McCarthy really is a poet. Not all people like poetry, of course. Some people are not suited for the lack of form it provides, the kind of fuck-all attitude poetry can have for rules. That’s fine. You’ll find that McCarthy also doesn’t care about rules though, and he’ll leave out punctuation and quotation marks as he wishes. Ignore the rules, their sacrifice serves an artistic purpose. You’ll get used to it.

      Of what would you repent?
      Nothing.
      Nothing?
      One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

      This is the sixth Cormac McCarthy book I’ve read, which may explain some of the reasons why I am a bit underwhelmed with it. The Crossing and All the Pretty Horses and The Road all punched me in the gut, but this book is lighter, more humorous, yet overall less cohesive. Cohesive is not what this book aims to be, so let’s not judge it on that, since this book aims to be episodic, not linear. But if you’ve come in after reading The Border Trilogy or one of his later novels, expect a shift in pace.

      In fact, the overall impression the book gives you is of stagnation--not much seems to happen: characters move in and out of jail and thus in and out of the narrative, characters fight, drink, look for jobs, quit their jobs. It’s a lifestyle that Suttree, our main character, is suited for. By the start of the novel, he has abandoned another life and has chosen to live in a houseboat, where he fishes for a living. If you thought Huck Finn was boring, don’t read this book. If reading a book with little narrative momentum appeals to you, then you’ll do just fine.

      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 don’t mean to undersell this book, because it really is very good, especially in comparison to any book that is not written by Cormac McCarthy. However, reading too much Cormac McCarthy can be like listening to a broken record, and you may as well just get out your Cormac McCarthy bingo board. Obvious but hard-hitting philosophical and thematic conversations with a tertiary character/wise old beggar/aged señora? Check! (This time it’s with a lamp, or his reflection in a lamp, I’m not sure.) Quick shifts from third person to first person? Check! Cold detailing of the environment? Check check! (Free space: the grotesque.) He’s a bit predictable, but that doesn’t make him bad. He’s good at what he does and there is no reason for him not to stick with it if the books he turns out are like this. Read a couple books of his and you can get a sense of his rhythm. It’s pretty neat and Biblical.

      The reason why I think this particular book falls a little flat for me is that the book can be a bit over-descriptive at times. It’s slow reading, which is fine, but not all of it is as interesting as it could be, even if the sentences are pretty.

      Life is fine and life is still, except it isn’t. Passing like the river under Suttree’s house is time. That is what this book is about--death and the passing of time, of loved ones, of places, of life. Everything flows by his house, every little thing.

      The color of this life is water.
    • 5/5
      There is not much you can say about Cormac McCarthy's work other than that he has the most unique and effective way of presenting reality of all contemporary authors. The most effective prose I've ever read, the most perfect prose painting of a backdrop for a novel is presented in the opening chapter of Suttree. The rest of the book follows suit, as we experience the poorer side of life on the wrong side of the tracks in 1950's Knoxville, Tennessee.

      Suttree is a person who has rejected his family (or, perhaps more accurately, rejected the family when his father rejected him). There is a deep morality to the character, who lives his life as a fisherman living in a houseboat on the Tennessee River. The lives described in this book are hard, sometimes hard-bitten, and non-sympathetic. McCarthy does not dole out convenient or contrived characters - they are multi-layered, multi-faceted humans.

      The book almost ends abruptly, confusedly; but then, so does life.
    • 4/5
      McCarthy's writing is absolutely marvelous; however, the picture he paints with his words is very bleak. The work tells the story of Cornelius Suttree who gave up his regular more affluent life to live in a houseboat on the Tennessee River in Knoxville and hang out with some shady characters. The reader is never certain why he chose to do this. McCarthy does a great job in recreating Knoxville of the 1950s. There were references to people and places included that only Knoxvillians or those very familiar with the city will completely understand. This is a masterpiece of American literature and deserves to be read by a wide audience. There are many themes in the book that would lend itself to great discussions in university literature courses as well.
    • 4/5
      McCarthy has the most remarkable command of the English language, and he uses it to the max in every sentence in this book. It is the story of a few rather brutal years in the life of Cornelius Suttree, a man of uncertain age, who has left behind a "normal" life for reasons he does not fully share with the reader, and now lives in a houseboat along the Tennessee River in the harsh mythic underworld of 1950's Knoxville. McCarthy's writing is monstrously beautiful, as in this passage:

      "It snowed that night. Flakes softly blown in the cold blue lamplight. Snow lay in pale boas along the black treelimbs down Forest Avenue and the snow in the street bore bands of branch and twig, dark fissures that would not snow full...Snow falling on Knoxville, sifting down over McAnally, hiding the rents in the roofing, draping the sashwork, frosting the coalpiles in the crabbed dooryards. It has covered up the blood and dirt and claggy sleech in gutterways and laid white lattice on the sewer grates...In the yards a switchengine is working and the white light of the headlamp bores down the rows of iron gray warehouses in a livid phosphorous tunnel through which the snow falls innocently and unburnt."

      As the snow covers the black and the frozen, the grim and the ugly, McCarthy's words nearly bury the realities of the world he is showing us in a softening shroud, but never hide it completely. By the end of this rather too long novel, the reader and Suttree have both had enough, and need to move on. Where Suttree might be going, what he might have gained from this episode in his life, is no clearer than how he got there in the first place. That, I think is the greatest failure of this novel.

      I loved parts of Suttree, the breathtaking word craft, the brilliant descriptions, the dark humor and often grotesque characters reminiscent of Faulkner's best. (I mean, a country boy shot and jailed for humping watermelons? Pappy surely gave McCarthy a commendatory nod for that one.) But it went on too long, sank a little too deeply into the mire too often, and made me grateful for its ending at last. Thankfully, McCarthy does not entice the reader into emotional involvement with his characters. As clearly as they are drawn, they remain at a safe distance from the heart; only one episode came close to touching my sympathy button, and it did so in part because it reminded me of another scene in another novel which was actually heart-rending. (I'm referring to The Dollmaker, a book I feel I need to read again, especially in this year of the American Author in the 75-Book Challenge group.) I don't mean to imply that McCarthy doesn't care for his creations; he does, obviously, but he does it in a totally unsentimental, no-BS, practical fashion, perhaps in the manner of a no-nonsense priest who runs a homeless shelter, or William Devane's prickly psychiatrist, Dr. Dix, from the Jesse Stone movies.

      Suttree is a masterpiece, there's no denying it. It would surely benefit from re-reading, but I won't do that, because it's too damned difficult to live with for that long.
    • 4/5
      This is my first McCarthy read and I have to say, that man is one gifted writer! His skill at capturing time and place through the written word is apparent. Reading this I almost felt as though I was back in 1950's Tennessee, McCarthy's attention to detail and choice of words/phrases perfected to convey this to the reader. His characters are colour, flamboyant real people.

      The main character, Cornelius "Buddy" Suttree is a paradox we never really fully understand - a man raised in a well-to-do family that, for reasons unclear, he has turned his back on and has chosen instead to live among and befriend the thieves, derelicts, miscreants, gamblers, whores and the poorer struggling elements of Knoxville's McAnally district. These are folks he knows from having served time with them in the workhouses, from getting stink face, drop down drunk with and from living the river life among them.and from living the river life. Suttree connects with these people and returned to them time and again as Suttree makes new friends. Suttree's life is a cryptic one, even for the educated Suttree.

      While the story is depressing in its strong portrayal of the daily scrabble for survival in what can only be described as an economic wasteland, McCarthy injects wry humour that for me, helped carry the story and made it easier to connect with the characters.

      McCarthy takes the reader on an amazing journey with [Suttree]. The writing and imagery alone make this a book worth reading, and a good thing too as the plot was thin and meandering and the last 50 pages were a let down for me after having kept me completely engaged for most of the book. While I was able to see, smell and almost touch the landscape presented, emotionally there was no connection, almost as though McCarthy didn't want his readers to connect with Suttree on an emotional level. A book to be read slowly and savored.
    • 5/5
      This novel is wondrous! As someone who's been reading stories for well over half a century I feel qualified to say that this novel, stacked up against every other written, is unique! I think that if anyone else tried to write a book of this type using the verbiage present in Suttree, it would be laughable.. McCarthy makes it wondrous! I read the first two pages with my mouth hanging open, I'm sure. Then I re-read them a couple of times and closed the book. I knew that I had found a treasure and wanted to be sure that I savored it fully.

      The story is about a man, Suttree, from a good family.. fallen from grace and living on a houseboat among the folks residing along the riverfront of Knoxville, Tennessee who count themselves fortunate if they are able to maintain a subsistence living fishing, thieving, whoring, gambling and the like. The ancient Greeks wrote stories like this.. but McCarthy does it better! This is a story filled with passages of pathos and humor and poignancy and horror. There are passages that I don't understand yet, but I intend to read this novel at least three or four more times before I'm done.

      If I could only take two novels to that timeworn desert island.. this would be one of them and I don't have any idea what I would pick for the second.. indecision would probably leave me with just this one! And that would be just fine...
    • 5/5
      This is my favorite book of all time and I've read at least 6 or 7 hundred.
    • 4/5
      This was a troubling and sometimes enthralling read. The lack of traditional plot did not bother me, as the marking out of the passing seasons propelled the story along. At times McCarthy's sentences and combinations of words are brilliant, and throughout this masks the dullness of the scenes that he describes. I disagreed with the blurb on the back of my edition, which said that Suttree rises above the squalor around him. I found him to be a hard and unlovable character for most of the book. For me, the young tearaway Harrogate was the character that provided the majority of humour and energy in the narrative, and found the sections dealing with his life the most enjoyable. For me, the ending was, despite the excellent writing, a little forced and convenient. This is a book worth reading just for the incredible use of words and images that fill almost every page. The descriptions of the Tennessee River in particular are astoundingly good in their complexity and depth.
    • 4/5
      Don't look for a moral to this story. McCarthy does a superb job of showing us life as it is, by turns heart-breaking, hilarious, and incomprehensible. This is not an easy read, but the effort is worth it.
    • 2/5
      This is only 1/5th of a review. That's how far I made it into this one. It was my second attempt and I really, really tried to stick with it, but 80 pages in with nothing really happening except a lot of drinking, vomiting, and sordid descriptions bored the hell out of me. The first 15 to 20 pages is sort of a Faulkneresque rendition of the setting, then it hunkers down into lowlife vernacular. Sorry, but I did not detect brilliance.
    • 4/5
      While I didn't find this to be one of McCarthy's best novels, it was decent. McCarthy does a wonderful job of creating a very atmospheric mood to the novel, and you really get a feel for the desolation and hopelessness of the characters. I just didn't find it to have the payoff of a Blood Meridian.
    • 5/5
      The title character is a grown-up Huck Finn, out of territory, and returned to southern mid-America--lto live in a ramshackle houseboat on the Tennessee River outside of Knoxville, to be exact. The Huck Finn echoes are reinforced by the unforgettable teenager Gene Harrowgate, one of the best comic inventions in recent American lit history. Indeed, McCarthy has crafted an epic where the participants are decidedly unromanticized no-future derelicts, and while the effect is often funny in a way you might never have imagined this author capable of being, it's just as often poetically and profoundly sad, as much as any novel I've ever read. A half-step away from the scintillating hell-fired prose of BLOOD MERIDIAN--kids, if you want a book that will build your vocabulary or else cause you "skullpangs," as McCarthy would put it, give this a try. Reviewed by:Phil OvereemLanguage Arts teacher
    • 5/5
      McCarthy is a master craftsman. This is a slice of Southern Gothic told in an arcane biblical language (there were a lot of words I didn't know). He conjures up a Southern City (knoxville) as hell and describes its denizens with humour.
      Never having read any Faulkner I can't be sure but I suspect it owes a lot to that writer.
    • 4/5
      Suttree is much more simplistic than The Border Trilogy, and No Country for Old Men. Consequently, the language is not as beautiful. McCarthy, in writing Suttree, was only honing his skill towards greatness.
    • 5/5
      Set in Knoxville Tenn. in the early 1950's the Cornelius Suttree of the title is a somewhat alienated from society--young man living on a houseboat along a riverbank--his friends boozers, petty criminals and assorted riff raff--whores, transvestites, barroom brawlers--both black and white. It seems to me to be a kind of period piece snapshot of the South after the second World War--this novel following the pereginations of Suttree from the county workhouse to the riverboat--to the variety of self employed (bossless) occupations he takes on to the one night stands--the drunken orgies--savage winters--the often violent deaths of many of his friends. McCarthy's poetic prose brings to my mind not only Faulkner but Dos Passos and the Selby of Last exit to Brooklyn or of Ondaatje's In the skin of the lion. It is very gritty and might not be for all tastes but I found it to be excellent in just about every way.
    • 3/5
      If you can decipher this, you're a better man, okay person, than I am.
    • 2/5
      I hope this doesn't get me kicked out of the Deep South group...
      but this was the second time I picked up this book and the second time I put it down having made it no more than 100 pages into it.

      I have always wanted to read this book and the "Deep South Review Challenge" gave me a renewed incentive. And after reading LouisBranning's eloquent review I REALLY wanted to read it.
      But I just couldn't dig my heels in.


      The long descriptives are well written, no doubt. Some are even poetic enough that you're tempted to read them aloud. But most are so long that they become distractions. There's only so much you can say about fog or darkness or streets, etc. There might be a hundred ways to describe a river, but you don't have to use fifty of them in one long sentence (bit of an exaggeration there).

      But all this negativity could be my fault. I'm trying to read this book late at night after work and all that. So maybe I'll try and pick it up again once things slow down and I can better squeeze myself into the book's pace and place.

    Book preview

    Suttree - Cormac McCarthy

    Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty water sliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun. A hand trails over the gunwale and he lies athwart the skiff, the toe of one sneaker plucking periodic dimples in the river with the boat’s slight cradling, drifting down beneath the bridge and slowly past the mudstained stanchions. Under the high cool arches and dark keeps of the span’s undercarriage where pigeons babble and the hollow flap of their wings echoes in stark applause. Glancing up at these cathedraled vaultings with their fossil woodknots and pseudomorphic nailheads in gray concrete, drifting, the bridge’s slant shadow leaning the width of the river with that headlong illusion postulate in old cupracers frozen on photoplates, their wheels elliptic with speed. These shadows form over the skiff, accommodate his prone figure and pass on.

    With his jaw cradled in the crook of his arm he watched idly surface phenomena, gouts of sewage faintly working, gray clots of nameless waste and yellow condoms roiling slowly out of the murk like some giant form of fluke or tapeworm. The watcher’s face rode beside the boat, a sepia visage yawing in the scum, eyes veering and watery grimace. A welt curled sluggishly on the river’s surface as if something unseen had stirred in the deeps and small bubbles of gas erupted in oily spectra.

    Below the bridge he eased himself erect, took up the oars and began to row toward the south bank. There he brought the skiff about, swinging the stern into a clump of willows, and going aft he raised up a heavy cord that ran into the water from an iron pipe driven into the mud of the bank. This he relayed through an open oarlock mounted on the skiffs transom. Now he set out again, rowing slowly, the cord coming up wet and smooth through the lock and dipping into the river again. When he was some thirty feet from shore the first dropper came up, doubling the line until he reached and cast it off. He went on, the skiff lightly quartered against the river’s drift, the hooks riding up one by one into the oarlock with their leached and tattered gobbets of flesh. When he felt the weight of the first fish he shipped the dripping oars and took hold of the line and brought it in by hand. A large carp broke water, a coarse mailed flank dull bronze and glinting. He braced tied on a fresh hook with a chunk of cutbait and dropped it over the side and went on, sculling with one oar, the carp warping heavily against the floorboards.

    When he had finished running the line he was on the other side of the river. He rebaited the last drop and let the heavy cord go, watching it sink in the muddy water among a spangled nimbus of sunmotes, a broken corona up through which flared for a moment the last pale chunk of rancid meat. Shifting the oars aboard he sprawled himself over the seats again to take the sun. The skiff swung gently, drifting in the current. He undid his shirt to the waist and put one forearm to his eyes. He could hear the river talking softly beneath him, heavy old river with wrinkled face. Beneath the sliding water cannons and carriages, trunnions seized and rusting in the mud, keelboats rotted to the consistency of mucilage. Fabled sturgeons with their horny pentagonal bodies, the cupreous and dacebright carp and catfish with their pale and sprueless underbellies, a thick muck shot with broken glass, with bones and rusted tins and bits of crockery reticulate with mudblack crazings. Across the river the limestone cliffs reared gray and roughly faceted and strung with grass across their face in thin green faults. Where they overhung the water they made a cool shade and the surface lay calm and dark and reflected like a small white star the form of a plover hovering on the updrafts off the edge of the bluff. Under the seat of the skiff a catfish swam dry and intransigent with his broad face pressed to the bulkhead.

    Passing the creek mouth he raised one hand and waved slowly, the old blacks all flowered and bonneted coming about like a windtilted garden with their canes bobbing and their arms lifting dark and random into the air and their gaudy and barbaric costumes billowing with the movement. Beyond them the shape of the city rising wore a wrought, a jaded look, hammered out dark and smoking against a china sky. The grimy river littoral lay warped and shimmering in the heat and there was no sound in all this lonely summer forenoon.

    Below the railway trestle he set to running his other line. The water was warm to the touch and had a granular lubricity like graphite. It was full noon when he finished and he stood in the skiff for a moment looking over the catch. He came back upriver rowing slowly, the fish struggling in a thin gray bilge in the floor of the boat, their soft barbels fingering with dull wonder the slimed boards and their backs where they bowed into the sunlight already bleached a bloodless pale. The brass oarlocks creaked in their blocks and the riverwater curled from the bowplanks with a viscid quality and lay behind the skiff in a wake like plowed mire.

    He rowed up from under the shadow of the bluffs and past the sand and gravel company and then along by barren and dusty lots where rails ran on cinder beds and boxcars oxidized on blind sidings, past warehouses of galvanized and corrugated tin set in flats gouged from the brickcolored earth where rhomboid and volute shapes of limestone jutted all brindled with mud like great bones washed out. He had already started across the river when he saw the rescue boats against the bank. They were trolling in the channel while a small crowd watched from the shore. Two white boats lightly veiled in the heat and the slow blue smoke of their exhaust, a faint chug of motors carrying the calm of the river. He crossed and rowed up the edge of the channel. The boats had come alongside each other and one of them had cut the engine. The rescue workers wore yachting caps and moved gravely at their task. As the fisherman passed they were taking aboard a dead man. He was very stiff and he looked like a window-dummy save for his face. The face seemed soft and bloated and wore a grappling hook in the side of it and a crazed grin. They raised him so, gambreled up by the bones of his cheek. A pale incruent wound. He seemed to protest woodenly, his head awry. They lifted him onto the deck where he lay in his wet seersucker suit and his lemoncolored socks, leering walleyed up at the workers with the hook in his face like some gross water homunculus taken in trolling that the light of God’s day had stricken dead instanter.

    The fisherman went past and pulled the skiff into the bank upriver from the crowd. He rolled a stone over the rope and walked down to watch. The rescue boat was coming in and one of the workers was kneeling over the corpse trying to pry the grapnel loose. The crowd was watching him and he was sweating and working at the hook. Finally he set his shoe against the dead man’s skull and wrenched the hook with both hands until it came away trailing a stringy piece of blanched flesh.

    They brought him ashore on a canvas litter and laid him in the grass where he stared at the sun with his drained eyes and his smile. A snarling clot of flies had already accrued out of the vapid air. The workers covered the dead man with a coarse gray blanket. His feet stuck out.

    The fisherman had made to go when someone in the crowd took his elbow. Hey Suttree.

    He turned. Hey Joe, he said. Did you see it?

    No. They say he jumped last night. They found his shoes on the bridge.

    They stood looking at the dead man. The squad workers were coiling their ropes and seeing to their tackle. The crowd had come to press about like mourners and the fisherman and his friend found themselves going past the dead man as if they’d pay respects. He lay there in his yellow socks with the flies crawling on the blanket and one hand stretched out on the grass. He wore his watch on the inside of his wrist as some folks do or used to and as Suttree passed he noticed with a feeling he could not name that the dead man’s watch was still running.

    That’s a bad way to check out, said Joe.

    Let’s go.

    They walked along the cinders by the edge of the railroad. Suttree rubbed the gently pulsing muscle in his speculative jaw.

    Which way do you go? said Joe.

    Right here. I’ve got my boat.

    Are you still fishin?

    Yeah.

    What made you take that up?

    I dont know, Suttree said. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

    You ever get uptown?

    Sometimes.

    Why dont you come out to the Corner some evenin and we’ll drink a beer.

    I’ll get out there one of these days.

    You fishin today?

    Yeah. A little.

    Joe was watching him. Listen, he said. You could get on up at Miller’s. Brother said they needed somebody in men’s shoes.

    Suttree looked at the ground and smiled and wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist and looked up again. Well, he said. I guess I’ll just stick to the river for a while yet.

    Well come out some evenin.

    I will.

    They lifted each a hand in farewell and he watched the boy go on up the tracks and then across the fields toward the road. Then he went down to the skiff and pulled the rope up and tossed it in and pushed off into the river again. The dead man was still lying on the bank under his blanket but the crowd had begun to drift away. He rowed on across the river.

    He swung the skiff in beneath the bridge and shipped the oars and sat looking down at the fish. He selected a blue cat and fetched it up by the gillslots, his thumb resting in the soft yellow throat. It flexed once and was still. The oars dripped in the river. He climbed from the skiff and tied up at a stob and labored up the slick grassless bank toward the arches where the bridge went to earth. Here a dark cavern beneath the vaulted concrete with rocks piled about the entrance and a crudely lettered keep out sign slashed in yellow paint across a boulder. A fire burned in a stone cairn on the rank and sunless clay and there was an old man squatting before it. The old man looked up at him and looked back at the fire again.

    I brought you a catfish, Suttree said.

    He mumbled and waved his hand about. Suttree laid the fish down and the old man squinted at it and then poked among the ashes of the fire. Set down, he said.

    He squatted.

    The old man watched the thin flames. Slow traffic passed above them in a muted rumble. In the fire potatoes blistered and split their charred jackets with low hissing sounds like small organisms expiring on the coals. The old man speared them from the ashes, one, two, three black stones smoking. He grouped them in a rusty hubcap. Get ye a tater, he said.

    Suttree lifted a hand. He did not answer because he knew that the old man would offer three times and he must parcel out his words of refusal. The old man had tilted a steaming can and was peering inside. A handful of beans boiled in riverwater. He raised his ruined eyes and looked out from under the beam of tufted bone that shaded them. I remember you now, he said. From when you was just little. Suttree didnt think so but he nodded. The old man used to go from door to door and he could make the dolls and bears to talk.

    Go on and get ye a tater, he said.

    Thanks, said Suttree. I’ve already eaten.

    Raw steam rose from the mealy pith of the potato he broke in his hands. Suttree looked out toward the river.

    I like a hot dinner, dont you? the old man said.

    Suttree nodded. Arched sumac fronds quivered in the noon warmth and pigeons squabbled and crooned in the bridge’s ribbed spandrels. The shadowed earth in which he squatted bore the stale odor of a crypt.

    You didnt see that man jump, did you? Suttree said.

    He shook his head. An old ragpicker, his thin chops wobbling. I seen em draggin, he said. Did they find him?

    Yes.

    What did he jump for?

    I dont guess he said.

    I wouldnt do it. Would you?

    I hope not. Did you go over in town this morning?

    No, I never went. I been too poorly to go.

    What’s the matter?

    Lord I dont know. They say death comes like a thief in the night, where is he? I’ll hug his neck.

    Well dont jump off the bridge.

    I wouldnt do it for nothin.

    They always seem to jump in hot weather.

    They’s worse weather to come, said the ragpicker. Hard weather. Be foretold.

    Did that girl come out to see you?

    Aint been nobody to see me.

    He was eating the beans from the tin with a brass spoon.

    I’ll talk to her again, said Suttree.

    Well. I wish ye’d get ye one of these here taters.

    Suttree rose. I’ve got to get on, he said.

    Dont rush off.

    Got to go.

    Come back.

    All right.

    A slight wind had come up and going back across the river he braced his feet against the uprights in the stern and pulled hard. The skiff had shipped enough water through her illjoined planks to float the morning’s catch and they wandered over the cupped and paint-chipped floorboards colliding dumbly. Rag ends of caulkingstring flared from the seams and ebbed in the dirty water among bits of bait and paper and the sweeps dipped and rose and a constant sipe of riverwater sang from under the tin of one patched blade. Half awash as she was the skiff wallowed with a mercurial inertia and made heavy going. He turned upriver close to shore and went on. Black families in bright Sunday clothes fishing at the river’s brim watched somberly his passage. Dinner pails and baskets adorned the grass and dark infants were displayed on blankets kept at their corners by stones against the wind.

    When he reached the houseboat he shipped the oars and the skiff slewed to a stall and settled ponderously against the tirecasings nailed there. He swung himself up with the rope in one hand and made fast. The skiff bobbed and slid heavily and the bilgewater surged. The fish sculled sluggishly. Suttree stretched and rubbed his back and eyed the sun. It was already very hot. He went along the deck and pushed open the door and entered. Inside the shanty the boards seemed buckled with the heat and beads of pitch were dripping from the beams under the tin roof.

    He crossed the cabin and stretched himself out on the cot. Closing his eyes. A faint breeze from the window stirring his hair. The shantyboat trembled slightly in the river and one of the steel drums beneath the floor expanded in the heat with a melancholy bong. Eyes resting. This hushed and mazy Sunday. The heart beneath the breastbone pumping. The blood on its appointed rounds. Life in small places, narrow crannies. In the leaves, the toad’s pulse. The delicate cellular warfare in a waterdrop. A dextrocardiac, said the smiling doctor. Your heart’s in the right place. Weathershrunk and loveless. The skin drawn and split like an overripe fruit.

    He turned heavily on the cot and put one eye to a space in the rough board wall. The river flowing past out there. Cloaca Maxima. Death by drowning, the ticking of a dead man’s watch. The old tin clock on Grandfather’s table hammered like a foundry. Leaning to say goodbye in the little yellow room, reek of lilies and incense. He arched his neck to tell to me some thing. I never heard. He wheezed my name, his grip belied the frailty of him. His caved and wasted face. The dead would take the living with them if they could, I pulled away. Sat in an ivy garden that lizards kept with constant leathery slitherings. Hutched hares ghost pale in the shade of the carriagehouse wall. Flagstones in a rosegarden, the terraced slope of the lawn above the river, odor of boxwood and mossmold and old brick in the shadow of the springhouse. Under the watercress stones in the clear flowage cluttered with periwinkles. A salamander, troutspeckled. Leaning to suck the cold and mossy water. A rimpled child’s face watching back, a watery isomer agoggle in the rings.

    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.

    From all old seamy throats of elders, musty books, I’ve salvaged not a word. In a dream I walked with my grandfather by a dark lake and the old man’s talk was filled with incertitude. I saw how all things false fall from the dead. We spoke easily and I was humbly honored to walk with him deep in that world where he was a man like all men. From the small end of a corridor in the autumn woods he watched me go away to the world of the waking. If our dead kin are sainted we may rightly pray to them. Mother Church tells us so. She does not say that they’ll speak back, in dreams or out. Or in what tongue the stillborn might be spoken. More common visitor. Silent. The infant’s ossature, the thin and brindled bones along whose sulcate facets clove old shreds of flesh and cerements of tattered swaddle. Bones that would no more than fill a shoebox, a bulbous skull. On the right temple a mauve halfmoon.

    Suttree turned and lay staring at the ceiling, touching a like mark on his own left temple gently with his fingertips. The ordinary of the second son. Mirror image. Gauche carbon. He lies in Woodlawn, whatever be left of the child with whom you shared your mother’s belly. He neither spoke nor saw nor does he now. Perhaps his skull held seawater. Born dead and witless both or a terratoma grisly in form. No, for we were like to the last hair. I followed him into the world, me. A breech birth. Hind end fore in common with whales and bats, life forms meant for other mediums than the earth and having no affinity for it. And used to pray for his soul days past. Believing this ghastly circus reconvened elsewhere for alltime. He in the limbo of the Christless righteous, I in a terrestrial hell.

    Through the thin and riven wall sounds of fish surging in the sinking skiff. The sign of faith. Twelfth house of the heavens. Ushering in the western church. St Peter patron of fishmongers. St Fiacre that of piles. Suttree placed one arm across his eyes. He said that he might have been a fisher of men in another time but these fish now seemed task enough for him.

    It was late evening before he woke. He did not stir, lying there on the rough army blanket watching the licking shapes of light from the river’s face lapse and flare over the ceiling. He felt the shanty tilt slightly, steps on the catwalk and a low trundling sound among the barrels. No shade, this. Through the cracks he could see someone coming along the walk. A timorous tapping, once again.

    Come in, he said.

    Buddy?

    He turned his head. His uncle was standing in the doorway. He looked back at the ceiling, blinked, sat up and swung his feet to the floor. Come in, John, he said.

    The uncle came through the door, looking about, hesitant. He stopped in the center of the room, arrested in the quadrate bar of dusty light davited between the window and its skewed replica on the far wall, a barren countenance cruelly lit, eyes watery and half closed with their slack pendules of flesh hanging down his cheeks. His hands moved slightly with the wooden smile he managed. Hey boy, he said.

    Suttree sat looking at his shoes. He folded his hands together, opened them again and looked up. Sit down, he said.

    The uncle looked about, pulled the one chair back and sat carefully in it. Well, he said. How are you Buddy?

    Like you see. How are you?

    Fine. Fine. How is everything going?

    All right. How did you find me?

    I saw John Clancy up at the Eagles and he said that you were living in a houseboat or something so I looked along the river here and found you.

    He was smiling uncertainly. Suttree looked at him. Did you tell them where I was?

    He stopped smiling. No no, he said. No. That’s your business.

    All right.

    How long have you been down here?

    Suttree studied with a cold face the tolerant amusement his uncle affected. Since I got out, he said.

    Well, we hadnt heard anything. How long has it been?

    Who’s we?

    I hadnt heard. I mean I didnt know for sure if you were even out or not.

    I got out in January.

    Good, good. What, do you rent this or what?

    I bought it.

    Well good. He was looking about. Not bad. Stove and all.

    How have you been John?

    Oh, I cant complain. You know.

    Suttree watched him. He looked made up for an older part, hair streaked with chalk, his face a clay mask cracked in a footman’s smile.

    You’re looking well, said Suttree. A tic jerked his mouthcorner.

    Well thanks, thanks. Try to keep fit you know. Old liver not the best. He put the flat of his hand to his abdomen, looked up toward the ceiling, out the window where the shadows had grown long toward night. Had an operation back in the winter. I guess you didnt know.

    No.

    I’m pulling out of it, of course.

    Suttree could smell him in the heat of the little room, the rank odor of his clothes touched with a faint reek of whiskey. Sweet smell of death at the edges. Behind him in the western wall the candled woodknots shone blood red and incandescent like the eyes of watching fiends.

    I dont have a drink or I’d offer you one.

    The uncle raised a palm. No, no, he said. Not for me, thanks.

    He lowered one brow at Suttree. I saw your mother, he said.

    Suttree didnt answer. The uncle was pulling at his cigarettes. He held out the pack. Cigarette? he said.

    No thanks.

    He shook the pack. Go ahead.

    I dont smoke. You used to.

    I quit.

    The uncle lit up and blew smoke in a thin blue viper’s breath toward the window. It coiled and diffused in the yellow light. He smiled. I’d like to have a dollar for every time I quit, he said. Anyway, they’re all fine. Thought I’d let you know.

    I didnt think you saw them.

    I saw your mother uptown.

    You said.

    Well. I dont get out there much, of course. I went at Christmas. You know. They left word at the Eagles for me to call one time and I dont know. Come to dinner sometime. You know. I didnt want to go out there.

    I dont blame you for that.

    The uncle shifted a little in his chair. Well, it’s not that I dont get along with them really. I just …

    You just cant stand them nor them you.

    A funny little smile crossed the uncle’s face. Well, he said. I dont think I’d go so far as to say that. Now of course they’ve never done me any favors.

    Tell me about it, said Suttree dryly.

    I guess that’s right, the uncle said, nodding his head. He sucked deeply on his cigarette, reflecting. I guess you and me have a little in common there, eh boy?

    He thinks so.

    You should have known my father. He was a fine man. The uncle was looking down at his hands uncertainly. Yes, he said. A fine man.

    I remember him.

    He died when you were a baby.

    I know.

    The uncle took another tack. You ought to come up to the Eagles some night, he said. I could get you in. They have a dance on Saturday night. They have some goodlooking women come up there. You’d be surprised.

    I guess I would.

    Suttree had leaned back against the raw plank wall. A blue dusk filled the little cabin. He was looking out the window where nighthawks had come forth and swifts shied chittering over the river.

    You’re a funny fella, Buddy. I cant imagine anyone being more different from your brother.

    Which one?

    What?

    I said which one.

    Which what?

    Which brother.

    The uncle chuckled uneasily. Why, he said, you’ve just got the one. Carl.

    Couldnt they think of a name for the other one?

    What other one? What in the hell are you talking about?

    The one that was born dead.

    Who told you that?

    I remembered it.

    Who told you?

    You did.

    I never. When did I?

    Years ago. You were drunk.

    I never did.

    All right. You didnt.

    What difference does it make?

    I dont know. I just wondered why it was supposed to be a secret. What did he die of?

    He was stillborn.

    I know that.

    I dont know why. He just was. You were both premature. You swear I told you?

    It’s not important.

    You wont say anything will you?

    No. I was just wondering about it. What the doctor says for instance. I mean, you have to take them both home, only one you take in a bag or a box. I guess they have people to take care of these things.

    Just dont say anything.

    Suttree was leaning forward looking down at his cheap and rotting shoes where they lay crossed on the floor. God, John, dont worry about it. I wont.

    Okay.

    Dont tell them you saw me.

    Okay. Fair enough. That’s a deal.

    Right John. A deal.

    I dont see them anyway.

    So you said.

    The uncle shifted in the chair and pulled at his collar with a long yellow forefinger. He could have helped me, you know. I never asked him for anything. Never did, by God. He could have helped me.

    Well, said Suttree, he didnt.

    The uncle nodded, watching the floor. You know, he said, you and me are a lot alike.

    I dont think so.

    In some ways.

    No, said Suttree. We’re not alike.

    Well, I mean … the uncle waved his hand.

    That’s his thesis. But I’m not like you.

    Well, you know what I mean.

    I do know what you mean. But I’m not like you. I’m not like him. I’m not like Carl. I’m like me. Dont tell me who I’m like.

    Well now look, Buddy, there’s no need …

    I think there is a need. I dont want you down here either. I know they dont like you, he doesnt. I dont blame you. It’s not your fault. I cant do anything.

    The uncle narrowed his eyes at Suttree. No need to get on your high horse with me, he said. At least I was never in the goddamned penitentiary.

    Suttree smiled. The workhouse, John. It’s a little different. But I am what I am. I dont go around telling people that I’ve been in a T B sanitarium.

    So? I dont claim to be a teetotaler, if that’s what you’re getting at.

    Are you an alcoholic?

    No. What are you smiling at? I’m no goddamned alcoholic.

    He always called you a rummy. I guess that’s not quite as bad.

    I dont give a damn what he says. He can …

    Go ahead.

    The uncle looked at him warily. He flipped the tiny stub of his cigarette out the door. Well, he said. He dont know everything.

    Look, said Suttree, leaning forward. When a man marries beneath him his children are beneath him. If he thinks that way at all. If you werent a drunk he might see me with different eyes. As it is, my case was always doubtful. I was expected to turn out badly. My grandfather used to say Blood will tell. It was his favorite saying. What are you looking at? Look at me.

    I dont know what you’re talking about.

    Yes you do. I’m saying that my father is contemptuous of me because I’m related to you. Dont you think that’s a fair statement?

    I dont know why you try and blame me for your troubles. You and your crackpot theories.

    Suttree reached across the little space and took his uncle’s willowing hands and composed them. I dont blame you, he said. I just want to tell you how some people are.

    I know how people are. I should know.

    Why should you? You think my father and his kind are a race apart. You can laugh at their pretensions, but you never question their right to the way of life they maintain.

    He puts his pants on the same way I do mine.

    Bullshit, John. You dont even believe that.

    I said it didnt I?

    What do you suppose he thinks of his wife?

    They get along okay.

    They get along okay.

    Yeah.

    John, she’s a housekeeper. He has no real belief even in her goodness. Cant you guess that he sees in her traces of the same sorriness he sees in you? An innocent gesture can call you to mind.

    Dont call me sorry, said the uncle.

    He probably believes that only his own benevolent guidance kept her out of the whorehouse.

    That’s my sister you’re talking about, boy.

    She’s my mother, you maudlin sot.

    Sudden quiet in the little cabin. The uncle rose shaking, his voice was low. They were right, he said. What they told me. They were right about you. You’re a vicious person. A nasty vicious person.

    Suttree sat with his forehead in his hands. The uncle moved warily to the door. His shadow fell across Suttree and Suttree raised his head.

    Maybe it’s like colorblindness, he said. The women are just carriers. You are colorblind, arent you?

    At least I’m not crazy.

    No, Suttree said. Not crazy.

    The uncle’s narrowed eyes seemed to soften. God help you, he said. He turned and stepped onto the catwalk and went down the boards. Suttree rose and went to the door. The uncle was crossing the fields in the last of the day’s light toward the darkening city.

    John, he called.

    He looked back. But that old man seemed so glassed away in worlds of his own contrivance that Suttree only raised his hand. The uncle nodded like a man who understood and then went on.

    The cabin was almost dark and Suttree walked around on the little deck and kicked up a stool and sat leaning back against the wall of the houseboat with his feet propped on the railing. A breeze was coming off the river bearing a faint odor of oil and fish. Night sounds and laughter drifted from the yellow shacks beyond the railspur and the river spooled past highbacked and hissing in the dark at his feet like the seething of sand in a glass, wind in a desert, the slow voice of ruin. He wedged his knuckles in his eyesockets and rested his head against the boards. They were still warm from the sun, like a faint breath at his nape. Across the river the lights of the lumber company lay foreshort and dismembered in the black water and downriver the strung bridgelamps hung in catenary replica shore to shore and softly guttering under the wind’s faint chop. The tower clock in the courthouse tolled the half hour. Lonely bell in the city. A firefly there. And there. He rose and spat into the river and went down the catwalk to the shore and across the field toward the road.

    He walked up Front Street breathing in the cool of the evening, the western sky before him still a deep cyanic blue shot through with the shapes of bats crossing blind and spastic like spores on a slide. A rank smell of boiled greens hung in the night and a thread of radio music followed him house by house. He went by yards and cinder gardens rank with the mutes of roosting fowls and by dark grottoes among the shacks where the music flared and died again and past dim windowlights where shadows reeled down cracked and yellowed paper shades. Through reeking clapboard warrens where children cried and craven halfbald watchdogs yapped and slank.

    He climbed the hill toward the edge of the city, past the open door of the negro meetinghouse. Softly lit within. A preacher that looked like a storybook blackbird in his suit and goldwire spectacles. Suttree coming up out of this hot and funky netherworld attended by gospel music. Dusky throats tilted and veined like the welted flanks of horses. He has watched them summer nights, a pale pagan sat on the curb without. One rainy night nearby he heard news in his toothfillings, music softly. He was stayed in a peace that drained his mind, for even a false adumbration of the world of the spirit is better than none at all.

    Up these steep walkways cannelured for footpurchase, the free passage of roaches. To tap at this latched door leaning. Jimmy Smith’s brown rodent teeth just beyond the screen. There is a hole in the rotten fabric which perhaps his breath has made over the years. Down a long hallway lit by a single sulphurcolored lightbulb hung from a cord in the ceiling. Smith’s shuffling slippers rasp over the linoleum. He turns at the end of the hall, holding the door there. The slack yellow skin of his shoulders and chest so bloodless and lined that he appears patched up out of odd scraps and remnants of flesh, tacked with lap seams and carefully bound in the insubstantial and foul gray web of his undershirt. In the little kitchen two men are sitting at a table drinking whiskey. A third leans against a stained refrigerator. There is an open door giving onto a porch, a small buckled portico of gray boards that hangs in the dark above the river. The rise and fall of cigarettes tells the occupants. There are sounds of laughter and a bloated whore looks out into the kitchen and goes away again.

    What’ll you have, Sut.

    A beer.

    The man leaning against the refrigerator moves slightly to one side. What say Bud, he says.

    Hey Junior.

    Jimmy Smith has opened a can of beer and holds it toward Suttree. He pays and the owner deals up change out of his loathsome breeks and counts the coins into Suttree’s palm and shuffles away.

    Who’s back in the back?

    Bunch of drunks. Brother’s back there.

    Suttree tipped a swallow of the beer against the back of his throat. It was cold and good. Well, he said. Let me go back there and see him.

    He nodded to the two men at the table and went past and down the corridor and entered an enormous old drawing room with high sliding doors long painted fast in their tracks. Five men sat at a card table, none looked up. The room was otherwise barren, a white marble fireplace masked with a sheet of tin, old varnished wainscoting and a high stamped rococo ceiling with parget scrolls and beaded drops of brazing about the gasjet where a lightbulb now burned.

    Surrounded as they were in this crazed austerity by the remnants of a former grandeur the poker players seemed themselves like shades of older times or rude imposters on a stage set. They drank and bet and muttered in an air of electric transiency, old men in gaitered sleeves galvanized from some stained sepia, posting time at cards prevenient of their dimly augured doom. Suttree passed on through.

    In the front room was a broken sofa propped on bricks, nothing more. One wonky spring reared from the back with a beercan seized in its coils and deeply couched in the mousecolored and napless upholstery sat a row of drunks.

    Hey Suttree, they called.

    Goddamn, said J-Bone, surging from the bowels of the couch. He threw an arm around Suttree’s shoulders. Here’s my old buddy, he said. Where’s the whiskey? Give him a drink of that old crazy shit.

    How you doing, Jim?

    I’m doin everybody I can, where you been? Where’s the whiskey? Here ye go. Get ye a drink, Bud.

    What is it?

    Early Times. Best little old drink in the world. Get ye a drink, Sut.

    Suttree held it to the light. Small twigs, debris, matter, coiled in the oily liquid. He shook it. Smoke rose from the yellow floor of the bottle. Shit almighty, he said.

    Best little old drink in the world, sang out J-Bone. Have a drink, Bud.

    He unthreaded the cap, sniffed, shivered, drank.

    J-Bone hugged the drinking figure. Watch old Suttree take a drink, he called out.

    Suttree’s eyes were squeezed shut and he was holding the bottle out to whoever would take it. Goddamn. What is that shit?

    Early Times, called J-Bone. Best little old drink they is. Drink that and you wont feel a thing the next mornin.

    Or any morning.

    Whoo lord, give it here. Hello Early, come to your old daddy.

    Here, pour some of it in this cup and let me cut it with Coca-Cola.

    Cant do it, Bud.

    Why not?

    We done tried it. It eats the bottom out.

    Watch it Suttree. Dont spill none on your shoes.

    Hey Bobbyjohn.

    When’s old Callahan gettin out? said Bobbyjohn.

    I dont know. Sometime this month. When have you seen Bucket?

    He’s moved to Burlington, the Bucket has. He dont come round no more.

    Come set with us, Sut.

    J-Bone steered him by the arm. Set down, Bud. Set down.

    Suttree eased himself down on the arm of the sofa and sipped his beer. He patted J-Bone on the back. The voices seemed to fade. He waved away the whiskeybottle with a smile. In this tall room, the cracked plaster sootstreaked with the shapes of laths beneath, this barrenness, this fellowship of the doomed. Where life pulsed obscenely fecund. In the drift of voices and the laughter and the reek of stale beer the Sunday loneliness seeped away.

    Aint that right Suttree?

    What’s that?

    About there bein caves all in under the city.

    That’s right.

    What all’s down there in em?

    Blind slime. As above, so it is below. Suttree shrugged. Nothing that I know of, he said. They’re just some caves.

    They say there’s one that runs plumb underneath the river.

    That’s the one that comes out over in Chilhowee Park. They was supposed to of used it in the Civil War to hide stuff down there.

    Wonder what all’s down in there now.

    Shit if I know. Ast Suttree.

    You reckon you can still get down in them Civil War caves, Sut?

    I dont know. I always heard there was one ran under the river but I never heard of anybody that was ever in it.

    There might be them Civil War relics down there.

    Here comes one of them now, said J-Bone. What say, Nigger.

    Suttree looked toward the door. A gray looking man in glasses was watching them. I caint say, he said. How you boys? What are ye drinkin?

    Early Times, Jim says it is.

    Get ye a drink, Nig.

    He shuffled toward the bottle, nodding to all, small eyes moving rapidly behind the glasses. He seized the whiskey and drank, his slack gullet jerking. When he lowered it his eyes were closed and his face a twisted mask. Pooh! He blew a volatile mist toward the smiling watchers. Lord God what is that?

    Early Times, Nig, cried J-Bone.

    Early tombs is more like it.

    Lord honey I know they make that old splo in the bathtub but this here is made in the toilet. He was looking at the bottle, shaking it. Bubbles the size of gooseshot veered greasily up through the smoky fuel it held.

    It’ll make ye drunk, said J-Bone.

    Nig shook his head and blew and took another drink and handed over the bottle with his face averted in agony. When he could speak he said: Boys, I’ve fought some bad whiskey but I’m a dirty nigger if that there aint almost too sorry to drink.

    J-Bone waved the bottle toward the door where Junior stood grinning. Brother, dont you want a drink?

    Junior shook his head.

    Boys, scoot over and let the old Nigger set down.

    Here Nig, set here. Scoot over some, Bearhunter.

    Lord boys if I aint plumb give out. He took off his glasses and wiped his weepy eyes.

    What you been up to, Nig?

    I been tryin to raise some money about Bobby. He turned and looked up at Suttree. Dont I know you? he said.

    We drank a few beers together.

    I thought I remembered ye. Did you not know Bobby?

    I saw him a time or two.

    Nigger shook his head reflectively, I raised four boys and damned if they aint all in the penitentiary cept Ralph. Of course we all went to Jordonia. And they did have me up here in the workhouse one time but I slipped off. Old Blackburn was guard up there knowed me but he never would say nothin. Was you in Jordonia? Clarence says they aint nothin to it now. Boys, when I was in there it was rougher’n a old cob. Course they didnt send ye there for singin in a choir. I done three year for stealin. Tried to get sent to T S I where they learn ye a trade but you had to be tardy to get in down there and they said I wasnt tardy. I was eighteen when I come out of Jordonia and that was in nineteen and sixteen. I wisht I could understand them boys of mine. They have costed me. I spent eighteen thousand dollars gettin them boys out. Their grandaddy was never in the least trouble that you could think of and he lived to be eighty-seven year old. Now he’d take a drink. Which I do myself. But he was never in no trouble with the law.

    Get ye a drink, Sut.

    Nigger intercepted the bottle. You know Jim? He’s a fine boy. Dont think he aint. I wisht McAnally Flats was full of em just like him. I knowed his daddy. He was smaller than Junior yonder. Just a minute. Whew. Damn if that aint some whiskey. He wouldnt take nothin off nobody, Irish Long wouldnt. I remember he come over on what they used to call Woolen Mill Corners there one time. You know where it’s at Jim. Where Workers Cafe is at. Come over there one Sunday mornin huntin a man and they was a bunch of tush hogs all standin around out there under a shed used to be there, you boys wouldnt remember it, drinkin whiskey and was friends of this old boy’s, and Irish Long walked up to em and wanted to know where he’s at. Well, they wouldnt say, but they wasnt a one of them tush hogs ast what he wanted with him. He would mortally whip your ass if you messed with him, Irish Long would. And they wasnt nobody in McAnally no betterhearted. He give away everthing he owned. He’d of been rich if he wanted. Had them stores. Nobody didnt have no money, people couldnt buy their groceries. You boys dont remember the depression. He’d tell em just go on and get what they needed. Flour and taters. Milk for the babies. He never turned down nobody, Irish Long never. They is people livin in this town today in big houses that would of starved plumb to death cept for him but they aint big enough to own it.

    Better get ye a drink there Sut, fore Nigger drinks it all.

    Give Bearhunter a drink, Suttree said.

    How about givin Bobbyjohn a drink, said Bobbyjohn.

    There’s a man’ll take a drink, said Nigger. Dont think he wont.

    Which I will myself, said J-Bone.

    Which I will my damnself, said Nigger.

    Jimmy Smith was moving through the room like an enormous trained mole collecting the empty cans. He shuffled out, his small eyes blinking. Kenneth Hazelwood stood in the doorframe watching them all with a sardonic smile.

    Come in here, Worm, called J-Bone, Get ye a drink of this good whiskey.

    Hazelwood entered smiling and took the bottle. He tilted it and sniffed and gave it back.

    The last time I drank some of that shit I like to died. I stunk from the inside out. I laid in a tub of hot water all day and climbed out and dried and you could still smell it, I had to burn my clothes. I had the dry heaves, the drizzlin shits, the cold shakes and the jakeleg. I can think about it now and feel bad.

    Hell Worm, this is good whusk.

    I pass.

    Worm’s put down my whiskey, Bud.

    I think you better put it down before it puts you down. You’ll find your liver in your sock some morning.

    But J-Bone had turned away with a whoop. Early Times, he called. Make your liver quiver.

    Hazelwood grinned and turned to Suttree. Cant you take no better care of him than that? he said.

    Suttree shook his head.

    Me and Katherine’s goin out to the Trocadero. Come on go with us.

    I better get home, Kenneth.

    Come ride out there with us. We’ll bring you back.

    I remember the last time I went for a ride with you. You got us in three fights, kicked some woman’s door in, and got in jail. I ran through some yards and like to hung myself on a clothesline and got a bunch of dogs after me and spotlights zippin around and cops all over the place and I wound up spendin the night in a corrugated conduit with a cat.

    Worm grinned. Come on, he said. We’ll just have a drink and see what all’s goin on out there.

    I cant, Kenneth. I’m broke anyway.

    I didnt ast ye if you had any money.

    Hey Worm, did you see old Crumbliss in the paper this mornin?

    What’s he done now?

    They found him about six oclock this mornin under a tree in a big alfalfa field. He found the only tree in the whole field and run into it. They said when the cops come and opened the door old Crumbliss fell out and just laid there. Directly he looked up and seen them blue suits and he jumped up and hollered, said: Where is that man I hired to drive me home?

    Suttree rose grinning.

    Dont run off, Sut.

    I’ve got to go.

    Where you goin?

    I’ve got to get something to eat. I’ll see you all later.

    Jimmy Smith fell in with him to see him to the door, down the long corridor, mole and guest, an unlatching of the screendoor and so into the night.

    It is overcast with impending rain and the lights of the city wash against the curdled heavens, lie puddled in the wet black streets. The watertruck recedes down Locust with its footmen in their tattered oilskins wielding brooms in the flooded gutters and the air is rich with the odor of damp paving. Through the midnight emptiness the few sounds carry with amphoric hollow and the city in its quietude seems to lie under edict. The buildings lean upon the dim and muted corridors where the watchman’s heels click away the minutes. Past black and padlocked shopfronts. A poultrydresser’s window where halfnaked cockerels nod in a constant blue dawn. Clockchime and belltoll lonely in the brooding sleepfast town. The gutted rusting trucks on Market Street with their splayed tires pooling on the tar. The flowers and fruit are gone and the sewer grates festooned with wilted greens. Under the fanned light of a streetlamp a white china cuphandle curled like a sleeping slug.

    In the lobbies of the slattern hotels the porters and bellmen are napping in the chairs and lounges, dark faces jerking in their sleep down the worn wine plush. In the rooms lie drunken homecome soldiers sprawled in painless crucifixion on the rumpled counterpanes and the whores are sleeping now. Small tropic fish start and check in the mossgreen deeps of the eyedoctor’s shopwindow. A lynx rampant with a waxen snarl. Gouts of shredded wood sprout from the sutures in his leather belly and his glass eyes bulge in agony. Dim tavern, an alleymouth where ashcans gape and where in a dream I was stopped by a man I took to be my father, dark figure against the shadowed brick. I would go by but he has stayed me with his hand. I have been looking for you, he said. The wind was cold, dream winds are so, I had been hurrying. I would draw back from him and his bone grip. The knife he held severed the pallid lamplight like a thin blue fish and our footsteps amplified themselves in the emptiness of the streets to an echo of routed multitudes. Yet it was not my father but my son who accosted me with such rancorless intent.

    On Gay Street the traffic lights are stilled. The trolleyrails gleam in their beds and a late car passes with a long slish of tires. In the long arcade of the bus station footfalls come back like laughter. He marches darkly toward his darkly marching shape in the glass of the depot door. His fetch come up from life’s other side like an autoscopic hallucination, Suttree and Antisuttree, hand reaching to the hand. The door swung back and he entered the waiting room. The shapes of figures sleeping on the wooden benches lay like laundry. In the men’s room an elderly pederast leaning against a wall.

    Suttree washed his hands and went out past the pinball machines to the grill. He took a stool and studied the menu. The waitress stood tapping her pencil against the pad of tickets she held.

    Suttree looked up. Grilled cheese and coffee.

    She wrote. He watched.

    She tore off the ticket and placed it facedown on the marble counter and moved away. He watched the shape of her underclothes through the thin white uniform. In the rear of the cafe a young black labored in a clatter of steaming crockery. Suttree rubbed his eyes.

    She came with the coffee, setting it down with a click and the coffee tilting up the side of the pink plastic cup and flooding the saucer. He poured it back and sipped. Acridity of burnt socks. She returned with napkin, spoon. Ring of gold orangeblossoms constricting her puffy finger. He took another sip of the coffee. In a few minutes she came with the sandwich. He held the first wedge of it to his nose for a minute, rich odor of toast and butter and melting cheese. He bit off an enormous mouthful, sucked the pickle from the toothpick and closed his eyes, chewing.

    When he had finished he took the quarter from his pocket and laid it on the counter and rose. She was watching him from beyond the coffee urn.

    You want some more coffee? she said.

    No thank you.

    Come back, she said.

    Suttree shoved the door with his shoulder, one hand in his pocket, the other working the toothpick. A face rose from a near bench and looked at him blearily and subsided.

    He walked along Gay Street, pausing by storewindows, fine goods kept in glass. A police cruiser passed slowly. He moved on, from out of his eyecorner watching them watch. Past Woodruff’s, Clark and Jones, the theatres. Corners emptied

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