Suttree

I'm a good three-hundred words into Suttree, one of the lesser known works of Cormac McCarthy. One of the blurbs on the back cover suggests that it combines Faulkner's 'gentle, wry humor' with Flannery O'Connor's freakish imagination. That's a nice, succinct way of luring prospective readers in - but its not true, in my opinion. First, I wouldn't say that O'Connor had a freakish imagination. Her characters were certainly not the kind you might expect to find in a standard novel, but her imagination was not freakish. I don't think an imagination can be freakish. Certainly the setting is Faulknerian. But it is foolish, and disingenuous I think, to offer any kind of blurb-sized summation of what is or is not appealing about any of McCarthy's work. This piece, especially, is difficult to define. Another blurbist says that Suttree reads like a doomed Huckleberry Finn. Again, that description is only useful as far as it goes. Yes, Suttree lives on the river, and passes up and down at times, but he is not on a voyage of discovery, or moving toward any greater awareness. Rather he, and the novel, are given to a dispassionate exploration of the river itself: the purlieus of its reality. Suttree walks from its muddy banks and their lesser known neighborhoods, to the shanty-towns hidden in the weeds or under the bridge, to the hustle and hucksters of Front Street, all of it around and about (and at times underneath) Knoxville circa 1950. Twain was in his own way, a moralist. McCarthy is in some ways, a scientist: he leads us on a thorough exploration of the sociological, biological, and psychological settings of this particular time and place. There is no movement up or down the river, figuratively speaking. There is movement in and out of the murk, a burrowing into the muck, a groveling in the mire. There are literal and figurative drownings of allegedly sentient beings, along with the evolutionary emergence of primordial, mud-sucking, primitive life forms, gasping with new gills for the stale speakeasy air. So, given McCarthy's reputation, his Pulitzers and National Book Awards, couldn't we just forego the blurbs entirely? It might be interesting, instead, to list the kinds of characters the reader is likely to encounter: blind gamblers, mad rag pickers, goat-herding healers, violent behemoths, idiot savants, dwarf black witches, junk men, winos, brutal cops, melon-bungers, thieves, murderers, alcoholics, a gay prostitute who calls himself Trippin through the Dew, to name a few. McCarthy is more than content to simply wallow in this madness. Other reviewers speak of Suttree's dignity, but that implies, I think, that the lead character is slummin. Suttree isn't slummin, though perhaps McCarthy is. It would be helpful to prospective readers if the cover previewed a small selection of the vocabulary that McCarthy has incongruously scrawled on the walls of his carefully constructed outhouse of a novel. From one early session of about 40 pages I jotted down a few that either puzzled me in their entirety, or in their usage. Knacker. Neap. Miring. Marcid. Gouts. Autoscopic. Sedge. Purlieu. Deckle. Concantenate. Revetment. Bunged. Nates. Tellurian. Leptosome. Let's see if I can remember what I found these words to mean? Knacker is a person who deals in distressed animals: horses for the glue factory, diseased cows for.. Neap is a word that I think is used to describe mediocrity, or staleness, as it comes from the 'neap' tide: neither a low nor a high tide. Miring I couldn't find, but took to mean getting bogged down, in the mire. Marcid I couldn't find either, but took to be a Faulknerian type of made-up or combined word, perhaps comprised of parts of marbled and rancid. Gouts! This novel could have been called 'Gouts'. McCarthy uses 'gouts' over and over to describe - at times, drops of blood, bits of sawdust extruding from a stuffed Lynx, or almost any other secretion that is not gushing out. It could be gouts of rain, or sap, or shit.. It is an archaic usage. Deckle is the rough edge on paper, or cloth or - in places, stone when it has been chipped. I have noticed that there are many words in Suttree that describe the edges of things, or the boundaries, or the lack of the same. Anyway... how's that for a love letter? A book review, of sorts. And don't worry, before the year is over I'll get to the ones you gifted me with. DF