Suttree
A novel by Cormac McCarthy
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East of the Evening Redness: Reading backwards from ‘Blood Meridian’
Introducing oneself to Cormac McCarthy through his 1985 novel Blood Meridian or The Evening Redness in the West is a rewarding, if challenging, way to get acquainted with the talents and virtues of this deeply literary author, with one caveat: upon finishing, it rather feels like there’s nowhere to go with the author but down. Not only is it often hailed as his magnum opus or ‘Great American novel’, but it is hard to imagine such extreme heights of sublimity being captured twice by one author . . .
As I read backwards through his bibliography from Meridian, I’ll be hoping to overturn this gut verdict, and to uncover for myself the highlights of his earlier, less often read works. Inevitably, this will be a tremendously unfair exercise; no book deserves to be compared with, or even read after, Meridian. But there is one advantage: it puts just as much focus on what McCarthy’s earlier novels do that Meridian doesn’t, as the inverse. In reading backwards through time from my first McCarthy novel, I’ll be looking at what each of these novels, each of which boasts a striking blurb of its own, uniquely brings to the table.
Suttree
The first Cormac McCarthy book in this series, and the author’s fourth overall, is a semi-autobiographical novel about a university-educated fisherman who lives on a houseboat on the Tennessee River, dwelling among various paupers, fugitives, and deviants. Suttree, or “SUtͭReͤ” as it is bizarrely styled on the cover of the 2010 release by Picador, definitely doesn’t hold a candle to Meridian in terms of the sheer tenacity of the latter’s plot, but it can certainly go scalp-to-scalp in regards to the quality of its prose. Suttree contains some of the most wonderfully and hauntingly morbid passages I’ve ever read, most of them squashed in indifferently by McCarthy between the nothingful goings-on of the titular protagonist and his extramoral acquaintances. “Plotless” would be an apt way to describe it; these profound moments seem to arise out of—and then disappear into—no inspiration at all, as if blown by the whims of an aimless wind. Even without the terrible, powerful narrative impetus that is Meridian’s Judge Holden—and, indeed, standing quite antithetical to Meridian’s character-driven plot—Suttree strives time and time again to make its mark, quite often catching by surprise when it succeeds.
As a result of this directionlessness, what little we are allowed to learn about the novel’s equally aimless protagonist comes at the behest of the supporting cast. Suttree is far from the only novel whose plot rests on the many shoulders of a wide roster of misfits, and it has perhaps been done better elsewhere. Some of Suttree’s characters tend towards being forgettable; others are overshadowed by the wild stories and schemes that they attempt to drag Suttree into. Most prominently among them is the young and stubborn ‘city rat’, Gene Harrogate, who is introduced into the events of the novel after having trespassed a farm during a moonlit vegetal rendezvous and, uh, fucked an entire patch of watermelons. Appearing often and usually with some incongruous degree of self-trumpeted fanfare, Harrogate excels at filling the novel with direction and humour. He demands that every moment of his presence be about his own, crazy life and nothing else, even as he dips in and out of Suttree’s—but there he is uncharacteristic of the rest of the cast, who are neither as distinct nor as interesting Harrogate, nor as Meridian’s sizeable roster.
Harrogate and the rest of these misfits, more than anything, contextualise Suttree himself—they are naïve where Suttree is sensible, ignorant where he is learnèd. They accentuate the difference between he and they, and as consequence make it impossible to ignore the life of privilege he once led. They draw us towards the voluntary nature of Suttree’s simple, if not destitute, present existence, and question his motivations, which are never explicitly revealed. So it is these comparisons which give the novel its tension: they interrogate its subject, demanding to know of Suttree’s origins, of his obscure history—the history from which, we presume, a man like that must be fleeing, if he has chosen poverty over it. Ultimately, details of this prior life rarely surface; when they do so, they do so all the more profoundly for it.
I said earlier that these, most brilliant passages of prose are “squashed in” between the obscurity of the rest of the novel, some of which is frighteningly mundane. But the dialogue, typically for McCarthy, it seems—is no more accessible. In Suttree, there are no reams upon reams of untranslated Spanish to befuddle and dislocate unilingual readers, yet it is just as easy to get lost in the dialogue here as it is in Meridian. There is precious little attribution to guide you, so learning the dialects, registers and tones of characters becomes a part of the game of trying to unpack this dense novel. I have heard it said that Suttree is McCarthy’s most humorous novel; it is true that so many genuinely witty exchanges of dialogue await the reader—but any one of them can go over their heads if they paid insufficient attention to a specific word or a previous, contextualising passage.
The difficulty is that Suttree has so many words and passages—and so many of them so abstruse and monotonous—that it is hard to maintain utmost focus throughout. Reading this novel is more akin to climbing a deadly and untamed mountain than enjoying a pleasant, oft-trodden hiking trail—comparisons with Ulysses are, if nothing else, justified purely on the density and complexity of the prose. (Thematically, there are other aspects to warrant such a comparison, but I won’t detail them here; Suttree is too good to be thrust into the shadow of that, too.) It is certainly not a novel to be skim-read—but the trade-off is that you can almost pick it up anywhere and you won’t be lost for too long. It’s not, in other words, the kind of novel you have to read through quickly or else risk forgetting crucial details. It is a kind of episodic epic, wonderfully inconstant in every regard; at once monotonous and musical, obscure and synaesthesic, inscrutable and revelatory, meaningless and sublime. Most strangely of all, thee virtues here seem to come through so resplendently only because they sit in contrast to its apparent vices.
Towards the end of the novel, McCarthy tells a joke through an exchange of imagined dialogue that occurs during one of the protagonist’s typhoid-fever induced hallucinations: —Mr Suttree in what year did your great uncle Jeffrey pass away? —It was in 1884. —Did he die by natural causes? —No sir. —And what were the circumstances surrounding his death. —He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way. —Our information is that he was hanged for a homicide. —Yessir.
So, what are the circumstances surrounding this novel? Well, it’s dense, difficult, cynical, boring, plotless and meaningless. But is it good? Yessir.
Also east of the Evening Redness — more in this series:
- Suttree (this article)
- Child of God
- Outer Dark
- The Orchard Keeper (pending)
