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Suttree |  | Author: Cormac McCarthy
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $15.00
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Seller: allnewbooks
Rating:  77 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: Stated First Edition
Pages: 480
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.3 x 1.1
ISBN: 0679736328
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780679736325
Publication Date: May 5, 1992
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
By the author of Blood Meridian and All the Pretty Horses, Suttree is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there--a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters--he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 77
 Wondrous Literary Art August 16, 2010
Sir Charles Panther (Alexandria, Virginny, USandA)
How to even begin a review of such a profound and magnificent work of art? How can I accurately honor such artistry with my own dull, inadequate words?
This is one of the greatest things I've ever read, the most beautiful prose I've ever encountered, an absolutely wonderful book. It hit me 30 pages in: this is the payoff in learning to read. This book is a stunningly beautiful thing, telling a simple but deep, rich, meaningful story. In short: Cornelius Suttree, in his mid-20s in 1951-54 leaves his wife, child, comfort and future to live in a rundown houseboat on the Tennessee River in Knoxville, and Life happens.
It wouldn't matter if McCarthy were writing about quantum theory, municipal waste management or marmoset husbandry, his magnificent writing would make it rich and entertaining.
For readers of The Road who want more McCarthy, I caution this is book is long way from that. There are similarities in the prose and some themes, but the two are very different works, separated by two decades. The undeniably lyrical McCarthy is there, but where The Road was necessarily sparse, this book is so much more intense and full, lovingly lingering on descriptions of almost all things, a marvelous impressionist narrative entwined with the story.
This book is not a simple and light read. It is dense, almost 500 pages. There are no quotation marks, and there are fleeting changes in tense and point of view, with extended mystical reveries taking the narrative in a decidedly Joycean direction. There are deep references to mythology, legend, and classics, with challenging vocabulary. Writers will love this book.
The book is an homage to a youth-memory Knoxville, bulldozed for progress. The incredibly evocative and photo-image fastidiousness of description, the incredible attention to detail of the river, its environs, and the city shows both McCarthy's intimate knowledge of it and his love for this place, despite its clearly described filth, decrepitude, poverty, and injustice.
The book is humorous, but this is no Dave Barry book. The humor comes from the unfailing human capacity for the accidentally ridiculous. Yes, these parts are very funny, but the stark reality of living rough on the river is ever-present.
This book is about freedom, and about the freedom of experiencing life. Life=the river. You can camp alongside and simply watch it go by. You may dive in, but you don't know what you'll find down below. You can cast off and let yourself be taken by it, but your destination and speed will be out of your control. Or you can navigate upon it, going against or with the current; you have choice and it takes you where adventure waits, but it tires, weakens and weathers you.
The book is a meditation on freedom, of letting go of the normal, expected and constricting, and living an unscheduled life of impulse, chance, and adventure, in a place and at a pace of your own choosing, responsible for oneself only. Suttree has done the unthinkable, abandoning a wife and son, for no reason other than freedom. Not money, a woman, or fear, but simply freedom. He is no coward, but he made a clear, rational choice in the face of undeniable and capricious mortality--so clearly shown in the book--for himself, his life, and his experience.
Suttree is an imminently likable person, and very few in the story do not like him. He is a good man, personable, nonjudgmental, open, welcoming, polite, and honest, angered only by dishonesty and injustice. He carries no grudges; but does carry pain, regret over the hurt he has caused, but not over the choices he has made. It's painfully clear he is smarter than the average bear, and he is drinking it all in, mulling it all over; he is aware of the wonder around him.
But of course, others just keep on intruding, the ultimate lesson being that pure freedom means an absolute cut-off, the life of the hermit, and ultimately (as Suttree discovers) starvation and madness. In the end, you can't be free, and to strive for it purposefully means disappointing and hurting others. To care is to become involved and invested, and you're hooked.
The comparisons to Faulkner and Steinbeck are apt, even Twain, but I found myself thinking more of Kerouac. The marginal yet satisfying existence and time frame are the same, and so many times there is that simple awe and wonder of life, the mysticism, on the river or on the road. There is no regret, no bitterness, no envy, only the wonder of what is experienced when free and out there in the world. McCarthy makes it clear this choice is hard yet noble, and those who refuse to make it, who are timid or unyielding, are damned to their own dead ends, whether in the penitentiary, or in loveless marriage.
Like the fantastic work of James Dickey, this is a man's novel, written by a man about very masculine themes and ideas. In some ways it is about the glory of being a man, whether it is the pleasure of a top-notch haircut and shave, a steak dinner, pride in hard but honest work, or the raw delight--and unpredictable insanity--in engaging with the opposite sex.
I have to close without even beginning to discuss things like the novel's place between North and South, McCarthy's take on racism, his nostalgia for old Knoxville, the meaning of the mystical reveries and the typhoid hallucination, his odyssey into the Smoky Mountains, the dead man at the end, his hooker-girlfriend, domesticity, and so much more.
Bottom line: This is a book I'll read again and again, and I know I will get more out of it each time. It is a masterfully written story, combining styles and approaches with deeply crafted poetic construct and vocabulary, with issues and themes overlapping and intertwining, offering a thick knot to slowly and enjoyably unravel.
Each book gets better July 29, 2010
W. Thompson
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Best yet. I started at the beginning. This is the best so far.
Book Review March 28, 2010
T. Pendergast
0 out of 3 found this review helpful
I am a fan of Cormac McCarthy, The Road is my favorite but this second best. Suttree is a great character.
 book February 8, 2010
quit smoking
0 out of 6 found this review helpful
To the layman reader, the book was overly comprehensive. McCarthy writes so much off the wall imagery its hard to naturally/instinctly imagine wtf he's talking about. The story it self is very slow.
 Suttree December 27, 2009
Chris (University of Alabama - Tuscaloosa)
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
This book toyed with my emotions in ways others had only fleeting success at doing. Just an absolutely marvelous depiction of rueful poverty in the South in the 1950s. Everyone knows McCarthy's good; Suttree, which is supposedly one of his most autobiographical, and its sincerity suggest that McCarthy's so good at riffling through the more morose aspects of human nature because he himself has lived through many of them.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 77
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