Suttree Books
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 Rating: - Fantastic.
"Mr Suttree...the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees."

Such are the characters and such is the language of Suttree, a novel about Cornelius Suttree, who in 1952 has abandoned his life of privilege because of his relationship with his father and has opted instead for the life of a river rat, living in a shoddy houseboat under the bridges of Knoxville, Tennessee and eeking out a living as a fisherman. When not checking his lines, he spends his time drinking, fighting, in jail, wandering through the woods alone, and hanging out with the dredges of society.

The world of Sutree is an underbelly of grime and muck, populated by a violent, immoral, idiotic but usually likable cast of characters. Suttree himself is one of the more noble of them, but the most enjoyable is a hare-brained schemer named Harrogate. Suttree meets the "country mouse" (as he calls Harrogate) in the workhouse after Harrogate is arrested for engaging in repeated carnal relations with watermelons. Later in the book Suttree finds him shooting poisoned meat from a slingshot, killing bats which he then delivers to the local hospital for a bounty ($1 per bat), and then again Suttree discovers him in a cave unconscious after his plan to dynamite a tunnel under the city and into a bank vault goes awry.

It takes awhile to care for Suttree, partly because he doesn't seem to care about much himself. But by the end of the novel, McCarthy has given us enough, in small pieces here and there, that we have in Suttree a deep, well-rounded and sympathetic, if flawed, character. All the big names have been thrown around by critics describing this book--Twain, Joyce, Steinbeck, Faulkner--but I feel like McCarthy is his own. Just as quintessentially American as Twain or Steinbeck, but wholly original. I'm actually surprised to say that I may like this book better than some of his later, more sparsely written novels. It's really really good.

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