Suttree

Paperback, 480 pages

English language

Published May 5, 1992 by Vintage.

ISBN:
978-0-679-73632-5
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5 stars (12 reviews)

Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1979. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee over a four-year period starting in 1950, the novel follows Cornelius Suttree, who has repudiated his former life of privilege to become a fisherman on the Tennessee River. The novel has a fragmented structure with many flashbacks and shifts in grammatical person. Suttree has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and called "a doomed Huckleberry Finn" by Jerome Charyn. Suttree was written over a 20-year span and is a departure from McCarthy's previous novels, being much longer, more sprawling in structure, and perhaps his most humorous.

3 editions

Review of 'Suttree' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

All the stars. Best book I've read all year. I'll have to think about this one for a while before I write a review. It's overwhelming.

I'm coming back to write this review literally years later in an attempt to come to some understanding of why I love this book so much. I have since read this book two more times and in fact I might just reread this book every year for the rest of my life because I enjoy it so much on so many different levels. This is quite simply my favorite book of all time.

warning, spoilers abound

Cornelius Suttree is like me in many ways. We were both raised in the catholic church, brought up properly, educated at the better schools, learned to respect our elders as well as the commandments but still, somehow our contrary souls can embrace none of it and we walk …

Review of 'Suttree' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

Like Leopold Bloom in Knoxville, the protagnoist Suttree, who seems to have grown up in better circumstances, has episodic adventures and encounters with the common people of Eastern Tennessee. McCarthy alternates his stripped down punctuation-less dialogue and detailed listing of simple actions with rich prose poetry that is often describing offal, vermin, decadence, the inebriated and death. All in all, it’s fascinating, inspired and brilliant. McCarthy seems to either understand his talents unusually well or he is very fortunate that his writing style fits and complements his interests perfectly. I must read his earlier novels.
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I’d rather make no negative comment, but in his interview with Oprah, McCarthy mentioned his dislike of dialogue punctuation (stating that there was no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks) and at least one reviewer has stated that there is never any problem with attribution in McCarthy’s work.
Well…yes there …

Subjects

  • Popular American Fiction
  • Fiction - General
  • Fiction
  • Literary
  • Fiction / Literary