Still, this is definitely literature, in the way that most people would use "literature" as a bad word. There 's no real clear moving plot, no suspense or climax, no hero (not really) and no villain. Nothing is at stake here, no wars or court cases or people's lives. Of course, in that way it is much more like real life, but hey, a lot of people have enough of that and don't want to read about it too. "Give us heroes," they cry. "Give us glorious battles and terrible defeats, worlds in the balance, loves and lives and the future of all mankind at stake. Give us DRAMA!" This is not the book for them.
In fact, McCarthy seems to want to avoid drama, mostly. Even the premise of the book-- a richÏyoung man who gives up all he has to be a bum along the shores of the Tennessee River--is way too dramatic, and is downplayed as much as possible. It hardly appears in the book at all, and then indirectly. This is a book about life, plain old life, if you can call bumming it along the river plain life.
Yes, this is a romance of the poor and beggardly, the drunk and skunkenly, the unpleasant yet beautiful, colorful and dirty folks of the underworld, the forgottens of Knoxville in all their glory. And I, for one, love it. It makes me want to leave my life, my nice little life, my forty hours a week life, and fish on the river, get drunk and suffer, live, die, and rise. Straight up, I've gotta say the hero reminds me of my man Jesus, cheesy or weird as that may sound to you. But the way he walks among the unpleasants, lives with grace, love, and no hint of judgement...it's amazing, it's beautiful, and I love it.
Yes, I love it. I love this book. It took me six months to read it because I loved it so much I had to take it slow and savor it. And the day I finished it, I almost turned right around and started at the front again. That's the joy of a (basically) plotless book: it's somewhat seamless, a circle in upon itself. This is the second time I've read it (the first time was for a class, and way too fast and with too much pressure and stress attached) and chances are, I'll read it again. McCarthy's other books are already on my reading list, though one of them was made into a Matt Damon movie and I can't imagine McCarthy and Matt Damon existing in the same universe. But I guess I'll have to read it to find out. A small smackering of that beautiful, truly beautiful writing:
"He woke with the undersides of his eyelids inflamed by the high sun's hammering, looked up to a bland and chinablue sky traversed by lightwires. A big lemoncolored cat watched him from the top of a woodstove. He turned his head to see it better and it elongated itself like hot taffy down the side of the stove and vanished headfirst in the earth without a sound. Suttree lay with his hands palm up at his sides in an attitude of frailty beheld and the stink that fouled the air was he himself. He closed his eyes and moaned. A hot breeze was coming across the barren waste of burnt weeds and rubble like a whiff of battlesmoke. Some starling had alighted on a wire overhaed in perfect progression like a peice of knotted string fallen slantwise. Crooning, hooked wings. Foul yellow mutes came squeezing from under their fanned tails. He sat up slowly, putting a hand over his eyes. The birds flew. His clothes cracked with a thin dry sound and shreds of baked vomit fell from him. He struggled to his knees, staring down at the packe balck earth between his palms with its bedded cinders and bits of crockery. Sweat rolled down his skull and dripped from his jaw. Oh God, he said. He lifted his swollen eyes to the desolation in which he knelt, the ironcolored nettles and sedge in the reeking fields like mock weeds made from wire, a raw landscape where half familiar shapes reared from the slagheaps of trash. Where backlots choked with weeds and glass and the old chalky turds of passing dogs tended away toward a dim shore of stonegray shacks and gutted auto hulks. He looked down at himself, caked in filth, his pockets turned out. He tried to swallow but his throat constricted in agony. tottering to his feet he stood reeling in that apocalyptic waste like some biblical relict in a world no one would have." (pg80-81)
"Of what would you repent? ... One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all."
Forget the comparisons to Faulkner, Melville, and any other fashionable names, or themes that somehow make Suttree sound like he's on a Harry Potter journey. ("Suttree and the Magical Midnight Mellonhumper"?) Or existential searches for meaning. (Can one have an existential search for meaning? But I digress.) Cormac McCarthy has his own unique voice, and it is, well, feculently good in this novel about the self-delusions of one man, Cornelius Suttree, as he attempts to rectify life, having been brought into the world at the same time as his stillborn twin brother. It is a novel to be experienced. The dialogue is stunningly true and a joy to read, and in unique McCarthy fashion, he finds a way to make sublime psychological observations about his characters without resorting to reading their thoughts. Here is a novel that recounts those "living on the edge" without the sentimental romantic claptrap of the Beat writers or Rousseau-rustic rubes. Sure, some of the writing is overwrought -- he spent 20 years writing the thing -- but it's still purty, and it's still McCarthy. To put a label on it, I'd call it a classic in the Southern American anti-intellectual tradition. What that means is this: long after people have tired of reading David Foster Wallace make fun of midwesterners who shop at K mart, or Philip Roth rhapsodizing about his penis, people will be reading the likes of Faulkner, O'Conner and McCarthy for a deeper understanding of our culture, our longings and our mythos. (Sorry. Couldn't help myself. Apologies to Melville.)