CORMAC MCCARTHY - Suttree
CORMAC MCCARTHY - Suttree
“I learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only,” says the hero of Cormac McCarthy’s fourth novel, Suttree. He is referring to himself, but the eponymous novel is also a singularity. As the prologue addresses the reader, “Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town . . . no soul shall walk save you.” As its pages are turned, the novel is also each man’s one and only Suttree.
Set in Knoxville in 1951, the novel opens with a fisherman on the Tennessee river, running his lines and stopping to watch the police haul up the body of a suicide. The fisherman, having pulled his skiff ashore for a better view of the proceedings, is spotted by an acquaintence: “Hey Suttree,” the man calls. We have now been formally introduced to Cornelius Suttree, a man who makes his living on the river, a river which transports as well as inspires, entombs, provides, swallows or baptizes the rudest of surviving forms (some of which finally do not survive).
Paperback
480 pages
May 5, 1992