Review: "Suttree"

It took Cormac McCarthy a while to find his audience. He won the National Book Award in 1992 for All the Pretty Horses, which was adapted into a film in 2000 starring Matt Damon and Penelope Cruz. But after I was first introduced to his writing, in early 2001, it was years before any of my acquaintances had heard of him. It was not until the release of the film version of No Country For Old Men and Oprah’s endorsement of The Road that the secret seemed to get out.

Blood Meridian, the first novel I read by McCarthy, had a lukewarm critical and commercial reception when it was released in 1985. Personally, it blew me away. It is now generally considered to be McCarthy’s masterpiece. If you enjoyed the film or novel versions of No Country or The Road and are looking for something more challenging, I highly recommend you check it out.

And yet, even though it was Blood Meridian that got me into McCarthy, and it had a profound effect on me as a writer, I firmly believe that Suttree (released in 1979) is in fact McCarthy’s best work (interestingly, Roger Ebert, who often mentioned McCarthy in his writing before it was fashionable to do so, agrees with this assessment). And so that’s the book that I’m going to write about today.

Cornelius Suttree abandoned his wife and child and left behind a life of privilege to live on a river boat in Knoxville. He ekes out a meager living fishing in the trash-filled Tennessee river among a bizarre assortment of alcoholics, drifters, criminals and lunatics, who love him because he is kind, calm, and removed.

But it’s easy for Suttree to be removed in Knoxville. It’s not his real life, which something, never explained, caused him to abandon. The reader sees, in glimpses, that Suttree is tormented by depression. At one point, Suttree wanders off into the mountains alone, in winter, driven by his own demons. When his mother visits him in prison, he is so choked with emotion he can’t speak to her.

But the novel is not as depressing as it sounds and it blends Suttree’s agony (and the trials of many other characters) with humour. Many of these laughs come courtesy of Gene Harrogate, a young man Suttree meets in a work camp. Harroage was imprisoned for having sex with watermelons, but tells Suttree “they tried to get me for bestiality by my lawyer told em a watermelon wasn’t no beast”, adding: “[h]e was a smart son of bitch.” Harrogate’s other schemes involve tunnelling into a bank and collecting a bounty on bats. Suttree, for his part, is involved in drunken rampages, the disposal of corpses, and other misadventures.

When Suttree returns home for a funeral, his passionate grief is contrasted with the slapstick attacks of his elderly relatives. When the police chief delivers a short speech which might contain the secret of the novel (“Everything’s important. A man lives his life, he has to make that important. Whether he’s a small town county sheriff or the president. Or a busted out bum. You might even understand that some day. I dont say you will. You might.”) he is immediately undermined because he tries to start his car when the motor is already running, and is rewarded with a “sudden wild screeching sound.”

At other times, the novel is funny and sad at the same time. In one passage Suttree asks an old homeless man about God.

Oh, I’d like to see him for a minute if I could.
What would you say to him?
Well, I think I’d just tell him. I’d say: Wait a minute. Wait just one minute before you start in on me. Before you say anything, there’ just one thing I’d like to know. And he’ll say: What’s that? And then I’m goin to ast him: What did you have me in that crapgame down there for anyway? I couldnt put any part of it together.
Suttree smiled. What do you think he’ll say?
The ragpicker spat and wiped his mouth. I dont believe he can answer, he said. I dont believe there is an answer.

Suttree’s a hard novel to figure out. It’s not a book for people who don’t like loose ends. Many plot lines are never fully explained or developed. And on a thematic level, it’s tough to be sure what it's really about. All I can say is that life is tough to figure out too, and that Suttree seems to capture the essence of some thing that doesn’t have a name and that no one else seems to have ever written about; some secret pain that we all bury deep within ourselves, something that hurts us so much there’s nothing we can do except laugh at it, or die.

For me, the key passage in the novel is when Suttree speaks with himself in the darkness and says: “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.”

I think Suttree is a man who has found life painful and hard and has attempted to escape it while remaining alive. He has abandoned the universal struggle to do something important and meaningful and allowed himself to sink as low as he could. But giving up all his ambition did not grant Suttree peace. He was unable to get away from the pressures of life, because he found dignity, humour, tragedy, love, and despair wherever he went, even among the most wretched. But by cutting himself off from the stream of life he gradually starved his soul.

I think this is speaks to most of us, particularly if we have a streak of depression in our character. Life can be so hard, and it can seem like the only thing to do is to give up. But in the end, Suttree learns that if you don’t face the darkness, it doesn’t go away. It just grows and grows. If you don’t keep moving the hounds of darkness overtake you eventually; you must fly them. And its why Suttree, despite its darkness, is a hopeful and inspiring book.