Cormac McCarthy is, according to many, one of the greatest living American writers of fiction. Based on his work that I’ve read in the past, I’m inclined to agree. He has published 12 novels. 2023, like most years, is expected to have 12 months. I will read one McCarthy novel each month, in publishing order, over the course of this year. Welcome to Cormac McMonthly.
“My life is ghastly.”
So says Cornelius Suttree in a destitute moment of fourth wall breaking self-awareness. He utters these words on a makeshift bed, spread out on the dirty ground, where he lies hungover and squalid, having just survived a night in an illicit den of debauchery and yet another run-in with the law.
Suttree is a hard man to like. Suttree is a hard book to like.
For the past few years, I’ve practiced mindfulness in the form of (near) daily meditation. While this has helped me mitigate the anxiety and suffering inherent in existing on this planet, it has also had the effect of making me even more aloof and detached than I was before. Unless I try hard not to, I tend to observe life as if I’m not really a part of the proceedings. I desire nothing (except what capitalism has brainwashed me into thinking I desire). I feel more akin to a mote of dust drifting in the breeze than I do to most people I meet.
If the above paragraph struck you as obnoxious, be thankful I’m nowhere near as talented as Cormac McCarthy. If I was, I might fuck around and write a whole novel from that detached perspective.
Suttree is a flex. McCarthy can string together a whole novel from that detached perspective, and pull it off.
While frequently quite funny and written with a poet’s precise attention to lyricism, Suttree is enormous in its sadness, repetitive and disconcerting like listening to a sloppy and self-entitled drunk hold court.
All in Suttree’s world is silt and sludge, worn out and torn up.
He chose this life for himself, wilfully turning his back on a comfortable, privileged existence. He lives in a houseboat on a turgid river in Tennessee, catching fish and selling them for scant dollars a day. He carouses with incorrigible drunks, vagrants, and small-time criminals, drifting in and out of their lives languorously. He comes and goes as he pleases, but is always welcomed back enthusiastically.
While his outlook may be admirable, I found myself dismayed by Suttree’s lack of desire to accomplish much of anything, and his complete shirking of responsibilities. Oh and his sexual relationship with a probably-underage girl. Who dies tragically immediately after he cuts her loose. Ol Sut just keeps right on ramblin, though.
It’s not clear how I’m meant to feel about Suttree, the man. That in itself is fine. He’s abandoned a wife and child, is constantly drunk or getting there, and in and out of prison because he can barely take care of himself. He flouts capitalist conventions, rejects societal norms, and undermines the cops whenever he’s able. He escapes the hospital twice, once while near death. He’s a ramblin man.
He’s also a father figure to a younger, even shittier dude named Harrogate, a rat-faced idiot who gets thrown in prison for a reason too hilarious to spoil here. Harrogate is straight out of a 1950s Warner Brothers cartoon, and one of the most consistently funny characters I’ve ever encountered. His series of moronic moneymaking schemes were the highlight of Suttree for me.
A surprising number of corpses are noticed in the periphery of Suttree’s vision. Ruminations on death abound. Those on the fringes of society are shown in all their glory, and never glamorized. But there’s no sense of momentum to any of it. Suttree doesn’t much care what happens in his life from one moment to the next, and as a reader, it’s hard not to share his malaise.
Suttree exists in the gutters, beneath layers of grime and discarded condoms and viscera, and it inspires the loftiest questions. What does it mean to be heroic, or anti-heroic? What is a life well-lived? Why read fiction? Why do anything?
Why commit to reading the 12 novels written by this one dude, McCarthy? Sure, the 12 in 12 gimmick is too delicious to ignore. But this project, such as it is, represents hours upon hours of invested effort. I’m not equating it to labour, or the skill-perfection of an athlete. Like Haruki Murakami says in the introduction to The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, the act of reading (fiction) is not only intensely individual, it’s selfish.
Yes, McCarthy is a much-revered writer with a singular style and a staggering command of his chosen medium. But his reputation alone wouldn’t be enough to convince me to deep-dive his works. There has to be something there.
I was introduced to McCarthy in undergrad, when an influential (to me) TA in one of my literature classes mentioned in an offhanded way that Blood Meridian was, for his money, the greatest English-language novel. In response, I either asked or thought about asking, “What about Moby Dick?”
I read Blood Meridian, and The Road, which was inescapable at the time. Later I read No Country for Old Men, because I loved the film adaptation. What I love about his work is what I’ve outlined in previous entries in this series: his ability to make America feel like a mythic place that exists outside of time. His ability to stare unflinchingly at the depravity of man, and set it against a backdrop of stillness that is sublime, in the literary sense.
What those books, as well as the two written prior to Suttree, have in common are plots that move. Intrigue and just enough accessibility to pull the reader along. Suttree, like its titular character, is content simply to exist, as it is. It doesn’t care what you think of it, and will confidently do as it pleases, entertaining its worst impulses to excess.
Supposedly, McCarthy wrote Suttree in spurts, over a period of 20 years. And it reads like that. Stray, florid observations made over a long period of time. Serial adventures, sometimes repetitive, sort of circling the same territory repeatedly. A vibe, a mood. No real story to tell, but many scenes to convey in vivid detail.
I haven’t yet read every McCarthy novel. I think that, once I have read all of them, I’ll look back on Suttree as a deep cut. An anomaly. I may never read it again, or I may read it once a decade between now and my own final escape from the hospital. I can see it going either way.
Four years ago, somebody posted this on Reddit:
Yeah. Yes. Fair enough.
The top comment on that post is:
Also this. Exactly.
And that is the conundrum of Suttree, really. It asks you how down you are to just chill in the murk, and watch shit unfurl. Does the prospect of a three-day hangover and being helped home by your scumbag friends in beshitted pants (Which of you? Who can say?) sound like something you’re willing to experience, if it helps you experience the realness of life man, the rawness…?
Well.
Shit.
In the introduction to The Penguin Book of Japanese Short Stories, Murakami also makes a mea culpa. He avoided reading Japanese literature for years, and guess what, as a result, he is not knowledgeable about Japanese literature. He says he always found it boring. He freely admits that there’s probably something about it that he doesn’t understand.
My time spent with Suttree was singular, and I’m glad to be rid of him.
Cormac McMonthly
January: The Orchard Keeper (1965)
February: Outer Dark (1968)
March: Child of God (1973)
I remember this one fondly, but it was most likely a right place, right time sort of situation. There are a few passages, like you mention, that are really, really good. The final scene being one of them.
You did an honest job of scoring up this one. I never knew it was written over 20 years, and I agree that it definitely reads like it was an on and off project. But even lower ranking McCarthy is still a head above most other novelists.
And as a check in - how you doing? You getting a tired of McCarthy yet? Still got a ways to go!
Just finished Suttree this morning and I thinkninfelt much the same as you. The book just meanders...and then ends. Directionless and seemingly purposeless, it arrives, lingers, and then leaves without attempting to even really leave an impression.
It does feel like McCarthy at his funniest and most lyrical, but it is a very strange book that I'm glad to be done with.
Excited for Blood Meridien, which I read back in like 2006 or something.