t o d d w a r n e r reviewed Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
a sprawling work of art
4 stars
The prose is stunning. Jaw-droppingly incredible The story paints a fascinating portrait of lives drifting along the edge of the world. So good.
Paperback, 480 pages
English language
Published May 5, 1992 by Vintage.
Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1979. Set in Knoxville, Tennessee over a four-year period starting in 1950, the novel follows Cornelius Suttree, who has repudiated his former life of privilege to become a fisherman on the Tennessee River. The novel has a fragmented structure with many flashbacks and shifts in grammatical person. Suttree has been compared to James Joyce's Ulysses, John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and called "a doomed Huckleberry Finn" by Jerome Charyn. Suttree was written over a 20-year span and is a departure from McCarthy's previous novels, being much longer, more sprawling in structure, and perhaps his most humorous.
The prose is stunning. Jaw-droppingly incredible The story paints a fascinating portrait of lives drifting along the edge of the world. So good.