“Cornelius Suttree, an educated middle-class Tennessean who has abandoned his family to live as a fisherman on the Knoxville waterfront, navigates the underclass of 1950s East Tennessee.”
What's in this book
- Cormac McCarthy's 1979 fourth novel — an educated Knoxville man lives as a fisherman among the city's underclass
- Pre-Blood Meridian comic-tragic masterwork; many McCarthy readers cite this as their favorite
- 471 pages of stream-of-consciousness Knoxville-as-Joycean-Dublin construction
- The Gene Harrogate subplot is some of the funniest contemporary American literary prose
- Richard Poe audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Blood Meridian, No Country for Old Men, The Road, and canonical contemporary American literary fiction
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Suttree is Cormac McCarthy's 1979 fourth novel, the comic-tragic Knoxville-set work that pre-dates Blood Meridian (1985) and that many McCarthy readers cite as their actual favorite of the entire McCarthy catalog. The structural premise is Cornelius Suttree, an educated middle-class East Tennessean who has abandoned his family in late-1940s East Tennessee to live as a houseboat-and-rowboat fisherman on the Tennessee River in Knoxville, navigating the underclass of 1950s East Tennessee (the bootleggers, the river-rats, the prison-released drifters, the broken-down moonshiners, the drag queens, the broken families, the prisoners working road-gangs on the river bridges). McCarthy spent twenty years writing the novel in Knoxville and the underlying autobiographical-and-observational specificity is the structural advantage that lifts the novel above his earlier work.
McCarthy's structural method is the patient stream-of-consciousness Knoxville-as-Joycean-Dublin construction across approximately five hundred pages, with the comic-tragic register that distinguishes Suttree from the biblical-prose Blood Meridian carrying the structural emotional weight. The Gene Harrogate subplot in the middle third (the simpleminded country-boy con artist whose attempts at fortune-making run from poisoning a watermelon patch to attempting to bomb his way into a downtown bank vault from below) is some of the funniest contemporary American literary prose of the past fifty years. The Suttree-Wanda subplot in the back third operates as the structural emotional engine and earns the late-novel narrative payoff that the rest of the novel's comic-tragic register has been holding back from delivering. Knoxville readers continue to use the novel as a structural map of the actual city as it was in the 1950s.
Recommended as the McCarthy entry point for readers who want to start somewhere other than Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men, for the broader contemporary American literary fiction audience, and as one of the canonical contemporary American comic-tragic Southern novels. Compare to Blood Meridian, Outer Dark, and the broader McCarthy catalog. The Richard Poe audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.
Related reads
If you liked Suttree
Blood Meridian
by Cormac McCarthy
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy 1985 review. A nameless teenager joins a band of Indian-hunters along the Texas-Mexico border in 1849. The most violent American novel of the late twentieth century and the rare McCarthy book that demands the prose attention it requires.
No Country for Old Men
by Cormac McCarthy
No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy 2005 review. A Texas welder finds a satchel of cash at a drug-deal massacre, and the man who comes for it does not stop. Late McCarthy in his cleanest thriller mode.
The Road
by Cormac McCarthy
The Road by Cormac McCarthy 2006 review. A father and son walk south across a burned-out post-apocalyptic America toward an uncertain coast. Pulitzer Prize 2007 and one of the great American novels of the twenty-first century.
Stella Maris
by Cormac McCarthy
Stella Maris by Cormac McCarthy 2022 review. Alicia Western's seven sessions with a Wisconsin psychiatrist in 1972. McCarthy's final novel and the companion to The Passenger.
The Passenger
by Cormac McCarthy
The Passenger by Cormac McCarthy 2022 review. A New Orleans salvage diver investigates a submerged private-jet wreckage. The first of McCarthy's two final novels.
Beloved
by Toni Morrison
Beloved by Toni Morrison 1987 review. Sethe, a former slave living in Reconstruction-era Ohio, is haunted by the daughter she killed to save from slavery. Pulitzer Prize 1988 and one of the canonical American novels of the late twentieth century.
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