In contrast to the absolute brutality of Blood Meridian, you can say that Suttree is a much more chilled opus. If you ask me what the story’s about, I can tell you it’s about a dude who lives in a dilapidated houseboat in Knoxville who makes his living by catching fish. Suttree, our title character, hangs out with his mates, occasionally drinking and getting drunk easier than a sixteen year old at prom, get beaten up at fights, rarely picking up girls, moving in and out a few kilometres away, trying to put up with winter, goes to jail a few months.
So there’s not much of a story here if you’re really into that. But if you’re a fan of McCarthy’s other work, you will like this book, as I did. His writing is something else, like Faulkner’s but more lucid and more often than not, more poetic. He is Baudelarian, describing filth with beautiful prose. Case in point:
At night he could hear the sewage gurgling and shuttling along through the pipes hung from the bridge’s underbelly overhead. The hum of tires. Faint streetlight fell beyond the dark palings of sumac and blackberry.
And:
Bearing along garbage and rafted trash, bottles of suncured glass wherein corollas of mauve and gold lie exploded, orange peels ambered with age. A dead sow pink and bloated and jars and crates and shapes of wood washed into rigid homologues of viscera and empty oilcans locked in eyes of dishing slime where the spectra wink guiltily.
It’s hard to find another writer who can balance the beauty and the filth in such a poetic way. Suttree is a lovesong to a lost South, where you can go out and leave your porch door unlocked, everybody knows each other on a first name basis and you can sell your fish to the butchers. It’s also a dirty place where condoms end up in the river banks, you can contract typhus relatively easily from poor hygiene and if you’re down out of luck, you just end up in jail and be released a few months later like nothing happened.
Suttree met a young drifter, Harrogate, whilst in jail. Both got into some trouble over some watermelons. Suttree took him under his wing, and later when Harrogate looks for him, Suttree was kind enough to watch over him before Harrogate offs himself with one of his stupid schemes, like blowing up underground Knoxville to get through bank vaults. Harrogate goes in and out of jail, sometimes missing in action, weaving in a cameo with nice threads and a fat wallet, and being a bum the next time we see him. His circumstances are a bit different than Suttree because he is a victim of circumstance instead of consciously rejecting society. Suttree also does not try to “beat” society, whereas Harrogate is constantly trying to find ways to outsmart it. Small man syndrome maybe.
Cornelius Suttree, our hero, is a societal reject to the first degree. He was a college kid once, and we can only assume that he dropped out. He got a girl pregnant and left her behind, living on his own in a that broken down houseboat. He hangs out with his mates whenever he runs into them and generally gets along well with everyone, because he is sincere. He also carries no prejudices and gets along well with the African Americans, some of whom are his best friends. Suttree consciously divorces himself from a conventional life of a wife and family, of a steady blue-collar job. He seems to take refuge in his difference. But even with this conscious rejection, he is still lonely and there is an inner dull pain that we sense in every passing page — a nagging and inarricable ennui.
I think this is what sets Suttree apart from McCarthy’s other books — the pain feels different. There is always a sense of foreboding in every single one of McCarthy’s protagonists, and Suttree is no different. But whereas his other books take the path of brutality, sometimes to violent ends, Suttree’s escape is to remove himself from Knoxville, to start search fresh again. We don’t know whether this attempt will help him find what he’s looking for at all. In this way, Suttree reminds me of On the Road’s Sal Paradise, always in search of “it” but never finding it. By this logic, you can say that Suttree is closer to Kerouac than it is to Faulkner.
