A very uneven novel. My rating ranges from three to four-and-a-half stars.

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.

In a previous post I stated that this novel, released in 1979, took McCarthy about ten years to write. That was, however, wrong, and in fact he had been writing in since the fifties, when he lived some of the events of the story. As independent scholar Write Conscious, who has gone over McCarthy’s archives, put it, McCarthy wrote very little in the last few decades of his life. Even his latest two novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris, which I loved and still haunt me, not only were set in the seventies and eighties, but were written to a significant extent back then (or at least almost fully researched). It turned out that McCarthy put lots of his own life in his novels. In the case of his last two and quite a few others, they’re heavily inspired by the love of his life Augusta Britt, much younger than him, ending up in a mental institution due to her extensive trauma (abandoned by her family, abused in foster homes… Presumably the whole getting-whisked-away-to-Mexico-by-Cormac also added to it).

In the case of Suttree, this novel I’m reviewing, it’s based around Cormac hanging out in the unfortunately named McAnally Flats in Knoxville, as the area existed back in the fifties and no longer does so. Many of the characters of this novel were real. One of them, named J-Bone, was a great friend of McCarthy’s, and the guy’s real home address as well as phone number from back then are depicted on the text. That means that we’re often treated to strange characters whom we’re barely introduced to at all. I’m not necessarily opposed to this; I believe that writing fiction is about making your own meaning and not necessarily satisfying anyone else. But that means that in a story already quite the mess, this panoply of weirdos only makes it harder to grasp.

McCarthy was apparently a drunkard back in the day. Also at the end of his life. I can’t stand drunks. He and his friends also got in serious trouble. I can’t stand criminals. So at times I had a hard time caring about what was happening in the story. Suttree tended to side with people who clearly should have been in jail or dead, and when some of them died, I thought to myself that it was about time. Still, some of those stories were wild enough to be interesting: going into pubs and stealing people’s money from their handbags and jackets (at the Indian Rock, for example, mentioned in Stella Maris by Alicia Western; her beloved brother used to bring her there on dates), plain-old robberies, brawls, general mayhem… It was hard for me to connect with that part of the story, which is about half of it: Suttree wandering from weirdo to weirdo doing stuff I couldn’t relate to.

The most memorable male character is an innocently evil melon rapist named Gene Harrogate. We are introduced to him violating a farmer’s produce, and he ends up in jail, where he meets the protagonist. He’s a small country bumpkin with seriously nasty instincts, whom Suttree really shouldn’t have been involved with. I have a hard time believing he existed in real life, as he was the larger-than-life type. There’s a whole segment with him digging tunnels under Knoxville and blowing up shit to the extent that it caused sinkholes, and led to him nearly drowning in shit. He also almost extinguished the local population of bats. Though entertaining, ultimately he was quite pointless to the story, as I didn’t believe that Suttree would hang out with such a fiend. That said, the story is generally a mess, so not much of what happens could be say to fit properly.

Three major sequences bumped up the novel’s quality for me: the first involves Suttree’s estranged wife and son, the second a nymphet unfortunately named Wanda, and the third a prostitute named Joyce. In real life, Suttree was indeed married and had a son. As far as I know, McCarthy was an utter bastard to that wife of his: he demanded her to work to pay the bills so he could dedicate himself to his writing, and when things got even worse money-wise, he demanded of her to pick up a second job. Understandably so, McCarthy’s family-in-law wanted him dead. He ended up escaping his home life, claiming that they stifled his creativity, which they likely did, and roamed around the south of the US, eventually ending up in a motel pool in Tucson, AZ, where he met an armed thirteen-year-old blonde and blue-eyed popsy with whom he fell head-over-heels. So that’s the whole deal with a estranged wife and son present in Suttree covered.

Wanda is the daughter of a down-on-his-luck pedlar with whose family Suttree spends some time in the best sequence of the book. This girl is described as having tits as well as fuzz down there, but Suttree repeatedly refers to her as a child. So she’s probably twelve-to-fourteen years old. The intimate scenes between Suttree and this girl are some of the most haunting passages of the book. This, of course, relates to McCarthy having met around that time the love of his life, Augusta Britt, whom the aforementioned scholar Write Conscious mentioned was very likely thirteen when McCarthy started sending amorous letters to her, and fourteen when they fled together to Mexico and started banging like there was no tomorrow, which McCarthy likely believed was the case, as the FBI was investigating Britt’s disappearance from the foster system. Regarding Wanda, the whole thing ends in a very McCarthy-ish way, with nature saying, “Fuck no, I ain’t lettin’ this shit go on.” I feel that the ending of that sequence will haunt me for the rest of my days. Chance and the universe’s indifference in general determining so much in life is a common theme in McCarthy’s work (the ending of No Country for Old Men comes to mind, and I mean the sequence with the protagonist and a fifteen-year-old runaway also based on Augusta Britt, which was sadly wasted in the movie).

However, the Wanda segment, my favorite part of this story, ended up becoming the biggest hole in it for me: I don’t believe for a second that Suttree would have been able to move on nonchalantly the way he did, with no fucking mention of the whole thing afterwards and no sign that it affected him. To me it reeked of McCarthy having written that part after meeting Augusta Britt, and then shoehorning it into the novel. Apparently, according to Write Conscious, in the letters with his editor, McCarthy’s “boss” demanded explanations for why he was so insistent on including the Wanda (and Joyce) parts in the story, but McCarthy refused to take them out.

The last of the three most memorable sequences for me involved a prostitute named Joyce, who bankrolled Suttree until her whorish life caught up with her psyche. Honestly the whole thing felt somewhat random yet true, which makes me suspect that McCarthy also got involved in such shenanigans.

What ultimately elevated the novel for me was McCarthy’s godlike writing. This story contains some of the best prose I have ever read. The first six percent or so of the text is so relentlessly high-quality in terms of careful observations that it boggles my mind to imagine what it took McCarthy to get through writing it. After that, the quality decreases as if McCarthy would have preferred to shoot himself than to keep holding himself to that standard. But most of the prose remains absurdly fantastic throughout, to the extent that it makes the vast majority of published authors look like children playing at pushing words together. One writer that McCarthy was helping do line editing in the seventies said that McCarthy’s edits made the guy want to quit writing. In my case, it makes me realize there are goals far in the distance that I can push myself towards.

This isn’t a novel I could recommend to anyone, to be honest. You have to fall into it, likely because you love McCarthy’s work. I’m glad I read it, but I suspect I should have gotten through his simpler remaining novels first (like the Border Trilogy, Outer Dark, etc.)

The following are quotes from the book that I highlighted.

He closed the cover on this picturebook of the afflicted. A soft yellow dust bloomed. Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as is this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle.

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.

You see a man, he scratchin to make it. Think once he got it made everthing be all right. But you dont never have it made. Dont care who you are. Look up one mornin and you a old man. You aint got nothin to say to your brother. Dont know no more’n when you started.

On a wild night he went through the dark of the apple orchards downriver while a storm swept in and lightning marked him out with his empty sack. The trees reared like horses all about him in the wind and the fruit fell hard to the ground like the disordered clop of hooves.
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.
He sat with his back to a tree and watched the storm move on over the city. Am I a monster, are there monsters in me?

There are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse.

In the distance the lights of the fairground and the ferriswheel turning like a tiny clockgear. Suttree wondered if she were ever a child at a fair dazed by the constellations of light and the hurdygurdy music of the merrygoround and the raucous calls of the barkers. Who saw in all that shoddy world a vision that child’s grace knows and never the sweat and the bad teeth and the nameless stains in the sawdust, the flies and the stale delirium and the vacant look of solitaries who go among these garish holdings seeking a thing they could not name.