No Right to Wretchedness: On "Suttree" by Cormac McCarthy

Suttree is a good novel. But you have to be curious.

Organized more like a river of rubble than a classically structured story, Suttree serves several slices of the life of Cornelius Suttree, also known as "Bud"—a dispossessed fisherman who lives on a houseboat and likes to get drunk with other bums. He's a mid-20th century Huckleberry Finn who inhabits a vision of Knoxville that lies somewhere between a horror film and a mushroom trip.

Unlike Huck, however, Suttree does not have a clear journey set out before him. He does things, and things happen to him, but we're never sure where's it going. The characters, images, and events of Suttree's story blend the humorous with the tragic, and the bizarre with the mundane. Bud is intelligent, according to characters who knew him before the readers did, although his intelligence rarely has an opportunity to express itself. Anyone who has survived an era of self-worthlessness can easily identify with Suttree: his flaw boils down to a predilection for self-destruction that manifests as alcoholism, prodigality, and a refusal to commit to a better life when opportunities present themselves.

But in spite of his very believable shortcomings, Suttree has an altruistic disposition, as evidenced in his kindness to his luckless friends and neighbors. McCarthy repeatedly shows how Suttree could be doing more with his life than what he's doing, but something is keeping him among his vagrant and criminal friends.

That's the question to be asked concerning Suttree's character: why does he live the way he does? I believe Suttree's motive for living among the poorest of Knoxville (in spite of his former financial privilege) is best explained by a love for those who exist on the margins of mainstream society, as well as a sense of disgust for his own darkly dysfunctional—yet socially acceptable—family. His abandonment of his wife and child is demonstrative of his conscious refusal to participate in normal social structures.

McCarthy's habit of avoiding almost all punctuation has an interesting effect in Suttree: the narration switches seamlessly between first and third person. Although most of the novel appears to be in third-person, there are be moments when we are granted access to the namesake character's thoughts. However, the moments where "he" and "him" change into "I" are not accompanied by a stylistic change. Suttree's view of the world is much the same as the view of the narrator: apocalyptic, bleakly romantic, and verbose.

Like much of McCarthy's writing, the narrator's diction (and/or Suttree's thought process) is beautifully but frustratingly poetic, and demands a strangely large vocabulary or the willingness to read on in spite of confusion. The dialogue, on the other hand, is quick, funny, and very southern. The contrast between the highly wrought narration and the sparse words of the memorable characters is often very entertaining.

Suttree is based on a period of McCarthy's life when he spent his spare time hanging out in Knoxville pool halls. In her essay "Huck Finn Rides Again," Leslie Harper Worthington cites an article by Mike Gibson that recounts interviews with Knoxville residents who knew McCarthy:

"...one such acquaintance says, "I think Suttree was totally autobiographical, more so than anyone will ever know." 

This claim is somewhat disturbing. As fiction, Suttree is a poignant portrait of a place, a time, an economic class, and a state of mind that retards personal growth. But read as an autobiography, it's downright fascinating. Thinking of the novel as a memoir-told-slant gives the feeling that McCarthy was writing to save his soul—that the justification of his youth was at stake.

In spite of (and because of) the dark tone of the book, the ending is mercifully uplifting. Suttree's inner change is believable, memorable, and a long time coming. "A man is all men," Suttree memorably tells a cynical derelict who lives under a bridge. "You have no right to your wretchedness." He's talking to the pessimist in all of us.

Those who have read some of McCarthy's other books should be able to tell that Suttree is his most intimate novel. Suttree is believable in places where Child of Gold is mythical, introverted in places where the Border trilogy is adventurous, stylistically sprawling where No Country for Old Men is efficient, and grounded in the traumatic reality of experience as opposed to the speculative nightmare of The Road. 

The Orchard Keeper and Suttree share a concern for believability, but while The Orchard Keeper is formally disorienting, scattered across several characters, and brief, Suttree is lengthy and almost entirely focused on its obvious hero. Suttree is concerned with inner darkness, as is Blood Meridian, but the latter's militarism and historicity has a distancing effect, whereas Suttree has a clear relevance to everyday life: the characters in Suttree are the people who asks us for change on the street. This is, perhaps, the key to relating to Suttree: resisting the temptation to condemn Suttree as merely pathetic, and allowing ourselves to see McCarthy's Knoxville in our own city, and Suttree's movement from despair to change and hope in our own lives.