Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

He crossed in the twilight a pitchgreen wood grown murk with ferns, with rank and steaming plants. An owl flew, bow winged and soundless. He came upon the bones of a horse, the polished ribcradle standing among the ferns pale and greenly phosphorescent and the wedgeshaped skull grinning in the grass. In these silent sunless galleries he'd come to feel that another went before him and each glade he entered seemed just quit by a figure who'd been sitting there and risen and gone on. Some doublegoer, some othersuttree eluded him in these woods and he feared that should that figure fail to rise and steal away and were he therefore to come to himself in this obscure wood he'd be neither mended nor made whole but rather set mindless to dodder drooling with his ghosty clone from sun to sun across a hostile hemisphere forever.

Cornelius Suttree lives in a houseboat on the Tennessee River. He makes a hand-to-mouth living fishing in the river and selling the fish to shops in Knoxville. The rest of the time he spends drinking with the down-and-out denizens of the river flats, mostly black but not all, getting drunk in whorehouses and pool halls. He goes by "Bud" or "Sut," and his patrician first name is a sign of a life he's forsaken, which McCarthy scrupulously avoids detailing but of which he offers tantalizing flashes: a visit from an uncle, or a horrifying scene where Suttree learns the young child we didn't even know he had has died. (His former, I guess, mother-in-law expels him from the funeral by nearly biting his finger off.) Relatives who appear to compel Suttree back into a life of good standing are brushed off; Suttree remains on the river.

Some have compared Suttree to Huckleberry Finn, which is true in the sense that both are set in the South and on a river. But in Huck Finn, the river, which moves ceaselessly toward the slave port of New Orleans, is the unstoppable forward motion of narrative; in Suttree the river is a place where the idea of life as progress is forsaken. The novel floats, too, through cycles of feast and famine, summer plenty and winter freeze, but there's no recognizable through line that would enable Suttree to grow or change or achieve anything. Suttree is haunted by a fear of death that suggests the life he's chosen is a recognition of the absurdity of striving in the face of death, or the unfeeling nature of the cosmos. (I'm guessing nobody told McCarthy that the French Broad River, where Suttree travels for a spell, is one of the oldest rivers in the world, because you have to think that would have made it in here, along with words like atavistic and arcane.)

This is the first of McCarthy's novels set in the South that I've read. He's so associated with the Southwest these days people forget his Southern Gothic phase, but I have to say, Suttree really struck a chord with me in its depiction of the South. There's a very specific sensation I associate with the North Carolina summer made of up heat, wild greenery, and droning insects, but also boiling concrete and gravel, that McCarthy's overcooked language can really capture. Suttree's Knoxville is a grotesque wasteland where condoms and dead animals and, huh, "jissom" can be found floating down the river. Its physicality is almost body-like, but in a way I can't quite explain, it felt accurate to me. I've always said that you have to take McCarthy's language as partly tongue-in-cheek, and the ironic detachment necessary to appreciate it seemed part and parcel with the way Suttree and his friends live lightly on the earth.

Suttree is also the funniest of all the McCarthy novels I've read. (Although All the Pretty Horses has its moments.) Novels like Blood Meridian and The Road are so grim and self-serious you wouldn't think McCarthy even has a sense of humor, but he does. In Suttree it's represented by a character named Harrogate, a pipsqueak kid who ends up in the workhouse with Suttree after getting caught copulating with a farmer's watermelons. (A real line from the book is, "Somebody has been fuckin my watermelons.") Harrogate is a schemer--trying to dynamite his way into a bank vault from the caves beneath Knoxville, or plugging up every payphone in the city and lifting the quarters--and a kind of picaresque version of Suttree himself, who never had a normal life to haunt him in his days of floating on the river.

I loved Suttree. For a book that's often disgusting and violent and terrifying, I kind of wanted to curl up and live in it. When McCarthy's really on, his words take on a kind of dadaist character, more about feeling than sense, and like the river itself, it's a pleasure to let them float past.