Suttree

Name: Suttree
Author: Cormac McCarthy

Cormac McCarthy · 1979

Cornelius Suttree walks away from a well-off Knoxville family to live on a houseboat among the river's drunks, prostitutes, fishermen, and ragpickers. McCarthy spent some twenty years on this 1979 novel, his most personal and by far his funniest: a comic elegy for a skid row he knew firsthand, thick with baroque Faulknerian sentences and a cast of holy grotesques, Gene Harrogate the melon-defiling country boy chief among them. The plot is mostly weather and disaster; the pleasure is the prose and the company. Cult readers call it his masterpiece.

The case against

on the vocabulary
“McCarthy’s idiosyncratic vocabulary and chronic verbal excesses will put off a lot of readers”
Kirkus Reviews, 1978
on the prologue
“The first sentence of the Prologue should have been a warning.”
a book blog
on the repeated episodes
“Serial adventures, sometimes repetitive, sort of circling the same territory repeatedly.”
a Substack review
on the grotesque focus
“I hope he will read Faulkner again and learn how to broaden his scope”
Walter Sullivan · The Sewanee Review, 1979