SUTTREE - CORMAC MCCARTHY

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  Finally finished it. Perhaps the book with the greatest disparity between the difficulty in reading it and my ultimate enjoyment. It was difficult in the traditional way, that is hard to follow and/or understand, like, say, CHAOSMOSIS, or even super long (tho, it is around 500 pages), I found its difficulty more subtle and hard to pin down. I made a serious attempt at the book a few years ago (maybe a decade?) and thought I had only made it about half way, but upon this reading, I realized I must have gotten much further than that since a passage that really stuck out to me, wherein a rag-picker details what he would say to god, was in the final 3rd of the book. I stopped that last time for the same reason it was tricky this time. The book is both very sad and written in florid, Biblical (King James) style. The style is familiar to anyone who’s read his other stuff, esp BLOOD MERIDIAN. SUTTREE also shares a violent, bloody milieu in the same vein as BLOOD MERIDIAN. The first image of the book is the police using a hook to pull a suicide out of the river. But while BLOOD MERIDIAN is relentlessly bleak and drenched in terror, SUTTREE mines this same material for a more humorous and melancholy vibe. So people get violent beaten by police or die in a mudslide but they also fuck watermelons and shoot the shit. Perhaps I’ve over-identified with Suttree, I think it would be fair to say we have similar interests and dispositions. We share an affinity for low-lives. He’s detached and sad in a way I found very relatable, almost to the point of making the book unreadable. But I did finish it this time and it does stand up with BLOOD MERIDIAN as total classics, it’s amazing he wrote the two back to back. This is also the only book I’ve ever read so focused on Knoxville and the surrounding areas, which is an area I know from college and certainly has its own weird flavor. There’s lots of talk and trips to Asheville, including to the Grove Park Inn. Like life, the book is very episodic. Sutturee fishes and runs into people, drinks and talks with them until he gets bored or passes out then runs into them again whenever. People are constantly getting killed or going to jail. The racial politics of the milieu that Suttree lives in are also interesting, with these low-class YTs interacting, befriending but also resenting their Black neighbors. Actually, Suttree’s class is somewhat at issue in the novel. We are led to believe he’s from a prominent Southern family who, before the start of the novel, has knocked up someone at college (lots of great shots at college in the book) before abandoning them to slum it with these Knoxville subalterns who the book memorably describes as, “thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots…and other assorted and felonious debauchees“. There is a part where he goes to, solo, bury his child in the rain, which is the only part of the book I didn’t really like since it shaded into melodrama. Also, the book frequently describes several women Suttree has sex with as “child-like.” The rest of it is expertly controlled. McCarthy apparently wrote this over 20 years and it shows, it’s perfectly calibrated. McCarthy so totally took the meat of the bone that he moved from Knoxville and never set a book there again. He really nails the ending too. Or rather, the post-script. The more formal ending cribs THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV ending where a character lies sick in bed, hallucinating and having vision (INFINITE JEST pulls this trick too), which is a good way to tie everything back together at the end. However, the short section right after really brings to mind BLOOD MERIDIAN, where the last thing image is of a man laying down fences and thus destroying the material conditions for the action of the book, SUTTREE ends with Suttree leaving town, just as highways are being built right through the slum, McAnally, where most of the action takes place, destroying the world Suttree inhabited. Modern life is again displacing a violent world. I’ll be thinking about this book for the rest of my life. 51 French Broads.