Not Alone, But Lonely

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy (1992)

Suttree is the story of an emotionally wounded loner who lives among a motley assortment of criminals, alcoholics, and other societal outcasts on the outskirts of Knoxville in the 1950s. Suttree is estranged from his family, but it's never made completely clear why he walked out his wife and child, his relatives, and the life of privilege he led. Surviving day-to-day on whatever money he earns from the spoils of his fishing, he never has more than a few dollars in his pocket, and those are inevitably spent by the day's end.

In this world of misfits and outcasts, happiness and companionship are fleeting. Hunger, cold, and drunkeness fill days. But there is more, the community that Suttree inhabits is filled with characters who befriend, support, and care for each other. Each character innately understanding the vulnerability they have in common. Each having experienced degrees of pain and hopelessness.

McCarthy's prose is complex and dense; more than average concentration is required of the reader. It's not uncommon to find yourself re-reading passages, each re-reading allowing the words and imagery to more fully unfold in your mind. The payoff are passages rich and full of feeling. The world McCarthy describes has layer upon layer of detail and through Suttree's gaze the elemental and temporal nature of life is revealed.

I'd recommend McCarthy to patient and focused readers. People who don't need an immediate payoff and who appreciate prose and language. An alternative to Suttree is Blood Meridian, a more intense, violent, and perhaps more accessible work. McCarthy is an author who will leave an impression.

"The willows at the far shore cut from the night a prospect of distant mountains dark against a paler sky. Halfmoon incandescent in her black galatic keyway, the heavens locked and wheeling. A sole star to the north pale and constant, the old wanderer's beacon burning like a molten spike that tethered the Small Bear to the turning firmament. He closed his eyes and opened them and looked again. He was struck by the fidelity of this earth he inhabited and he bore it sudden love."

"You see a man, he scratchin' to make it. Think once he got it made everything be all right. But you don't never have it made. Don't care who you are. Look up one morning and you a old man. You got nothin to say to your brother. Don't know no more'n when you started."

"He looked at a world of incredible loveliness. Old distaff Celt's blood in some back chamber of his brain moved him to discourse with the birches, with the oaks. A cool green fire kept breaking in the woods and he could hear the footsteps of the dead. Everything had fallen from him. He scarce could tell where his being ended or the world began nor did he care. He lay on his back in the gravel, the earth's core sucking his bones, a moment's giddy vertigo with this illusion of falling outward through blue and windy space, over the offside of the planet, hurtling through the high thin cirrus."

"Somewhere in the gray wood by the river is the huntsman and in the brooming corn and in the castellated press of cities. His work lies all wheres and his hounds tire not. I have seen them in a dream slaverous and wild and their eyes crazed with ravening for souls in this world. Fly them."