Suttree
by Cormac McCarthy(1979)
NovelEnglish
“Ordinary men withered and died. And died. And died. Until none were left.”
Suttree
Cormac McCarthy(1979)
Along the filthy banks of the Tennessee River in 1950s Knoxville, a man of good family lives in a houseboat among drunks, petty criminals, ragpickers, and the discarded poor, having renounced the respectable world for reasons he can barely articulate. Cornelius Suttree fishes for catfish, drinks until the world dissolves, buries friends, and circles a death that seems to be circling him. McCarthy wrote this novel over nearly twenty years, pouring into it a lyricism so extravagant it transforms squalor into something sacramental. Every sentence throbs with life and its negation. It is a book about choosing to live among the damned and discovering that grace, if it exists at all, is found precisely there.
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Joyce maps one city with the same obsessive lyricism; McCarthy maps another, but the river replaces the sea.
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Lowry writes the same doomed, drunken poetry of a man sinking into a landscape that is also a state of mind.
Huckleberry FinnMark Twain
Twain sends another man down a Southern river, but Suttree knows what Huck doesn't: there's nowhere to float to.