What the Living Carry
“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember, and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”
— Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
The Music Arrives Whole
I knew almost immediately.
That sounds unfair to the three novels before Suttree, all of which I admire, and one of the pleasures of this project has been discovering just how much of Cormac McCarthy was already there from the beginning.The Orchard Keeper Keeps the Rot was partly about that astonishment: the language, darkness, comedy, landscape, violence, and mythic pressure were already present, even when they sometimes competed for space.
I called it McCarthy before he had fully mastered McCarthy.
What Cannot Be Named, my essay on Outer Dark, found the control tightening. The nightmare had cleaner edges. Dialogue became more important. Plot and prose began serving the same terrible design.
ThenBuried With the Name of Man found Child of God becoming leaner still. McCarthy could shift tense deliberately, move from grotesque comedy into atrocity, and build Lester Ballard from gestures and objects rather than explanation.
All of those books remain great to me.
But, Suttree feels like a bend in the work.
Not a turning point exactly. Nothing before it needs to be discarded, and nothing after it suddenly belongs to an entirely different writer. I am not even sure I would call Suttree McCarthy’s best novel, despite everything I am about to say about it.
It feels instead like the beginning of his mature period.
The difference is not that the experimentation stops.
It is that the experimentation has stopped sounding like uncertainty.
From the opening pages, the language is music. I mean that almost literally. Listening to the audiobook, there were long passages I knew I could rewind and hear again, then rewind again, and still probably fail to account for everything happening inside them. The sentences describe rivers, mud, buildings, bodies, darkness, animals, ruined streets, cold, summer heat, and the old life of Knoxville until description itself begins to feel mythic.
Eventually I stopped trying to catch all of it.
There was too much.
I took fewer notes on Suttree than on the previous novels, not because there was less to notice, but because stopping to name everything began to feel like stepping out of the river.
That became its own kind of note.
There are books I want to understand by taking them apart. With Suttree, I increasingly wanted to let the book remain assembled around me. Some passages were obviously doing more than I could grasp in a single listen. I could have spent hours pulling apart images, syntax, religious language, shifts in perspective, and descriptions of the land.
Instead I sometimes just acknowledged the thing.
This is beautiful.
This is doing something to me.
Keep going.
The Dead by the River
The river is already there when we properly meet Cornelius Suttree.
He is fishing when he and other fishermen encounter the body of a man, presumably a suicide. Someone has thrown a rough covering over him, but his feet remain exposed.
Then Suttree notices his watch.
The man wears it turned inward on his wrist, and the watch may still be ticking.
That image stayed with me. The body has stopped. The mechanism has not. Time continues measuring itself against someone for whom measurement no longer matters.
McCarthy then immediately starts showing us what kind of man Suttree is.
An older man offers him food. Suttree knows in advance that the offer will come three times.
It does.
This is not the intellectual brilliance McCarthy will later give Alicia Western in Stella Maris. Suttree does not announce his intelligence. He reads people. He understands ritual. He knows when someone is being polite, when someone actually wants something, and when a conversation has reached its natural end.
There is another strange moment when Suttree tells his uncle that he remembers his father. His uncle points out that Suttree was only a baby.
Suttree knows.
He remembers anyway.
I thought of Alicia there too. Not because Suttree is Alicia-level brilliant or because McCarthy is making some claim about impossible infant memory that I can neatly explain, but because both characters seem suspicious of ordinary boundaries around what a mind is allowed to know.
Alicia argues those boundaries to pieces.
Suttree simply says he remembers.
I will have much more to say about Alicia when I get to Stella Maris, just as I will about Bobby Western in The Passenger. I intend to write about those two novels together because, to me, they are two halves of the same thing.
For now, the resemblance is worth noting.
Suttree’s intelligence is quieter.
It shows up in attention.
Who Gets Suttree’s Time
More than once, someone tells Suttree that he has to get on, and Suttree lets him.
More than once, Suttree says essentially the same thing and is allowed to leave.
That phrase caught me because McCarthy has already used versions of it elsewhere. Culla repeatedly has to get on in Outer Dark, usually because remaining somewhere would mean becoming answerable.
The words barely change.
The person saying them changes everything.
Suttree usually understands what another person’s time belongs to. He talks briefly with boys who are fishing because he seems genuinely interested. He could keep walking. He does not. For whatever reason, those boys and their fishing are worth a few minutes.
J-Bone, one of Suttree’s old friends and regular drinking companions, calls to him from inside as he passes.
Suttree goes in.
That seems small until you notice how often Suttree does not allow himself to be detained. J-Bone is someone who gets to interrupt him.
J-Bone is also the one who passes along the message that Suttree’s father wants him to call.
Suttree refuses.
That refusal immediately reminded me of White in The Sunset Limited, refusing to visit his father while the man is dying of cancer. The circumstances are different, and I do not want to flatten the two characters into one, but McCarthy seems drawn to men whose estrangement from their fathers is so complete that even the rituals surrounding death do not necessarily break it.
I will have much more to say about White and Black when I eventually reach The Sunset Limited.
Harrogate is almost Suttree’s opposite in these social exchanges.
Gene Harrogate is the young man Suttree meets in the workhouse, an impoverished, socially oblivious figure who has landed there after his infamous trouble involving watermelons. He will later become known as the “midnight melon mounter,” which is somehow both humiliating and extremely funny.
Harrogate often does not understand when a conversation is over.
Later, when he gets a miserable little apartment in Knoxville, Suttree shows genuine interest in the place. Suttree eventually says he needs to leave, but Harrogate simply keeps talking.
Suttree stays.
Partly, Harrogate has failed to read the cue.
But, Suttree also seems interested enough to allow him to fail.
The contrast keeps sharpening. Harrogate does not understand social boundaries. Suttree understands them almost instinctively.
Then, much later, after some of the darkest narration in the novel, another man says he has to get on.
Suttree asks him to stay.
By then the phrase means something else entirely.
Do not leave me alone with this.
Graves Again
I have somehow ended up writing about graves in every one of these essays.
That seems appropriate.
In The Orchard Keeper, the grave becomes pit, altar, ash, evidence, and finally part of a much larger continuity in which even figures like Tut and Agamemnon are reduced by death.
In Outer Dark, graves fail to keep what is placed inside them.
In Child of God, Lester Ballard is eventually returned to the earth after even his body has been opened and examined.
Then Suttree gives me the grave that hurt the most.
The call Suttree refuses to make concerns his son.
The child is dead.
At the funeral, Suttree hangs apart from the others. Then, after everyone else has left, he wants the grave filled immediately. The cemetery workers are apparently waiting for machinery.
Suttree takes a shovel and does it himself.
This is not the Suttree we have known.
He has been observant, socially adept, detached, frequently drunk, sometimes reckless, and often difficult to locate emotionally. He is surrounded by funny people but rarely seems to laugh himself.
Here he is sorrowful in a way he has not allowed himself to be anywhere else.
And, suddenly the corpse by the river returns.
That stranger had been covered incompletely, his feet still showing beneath the blanket.
Suttree will not leave his own son uncovered.
Work has changed too.
Culla works because circumstance or punishment forces him to. Lester discovers that jail can provide more dependable food than freedom.
Harrogate later steals a hog because he wants to eat it, kills it in a prolonged and brutal way, and is caught by the Black man who owns it. The owner offers him a way to work off the ten-dollar debt.
Harrogate immediately asks what the hourly wage will be.
Fifty cents.
He tries for seventy-five.
He is ignored.
Then he resents the work almost from the beginning, even though he is also being fed.
The whole thing is pitiful because Harrogate seems perpetually capable of creating the conditions of his own humiliation and then experiencing himself mainly as their victim. His racism makes the episode uglier still. The man he despises has given him a practical way to repay something Harrogate unquestionably stole.
And, McCarthy still finds room to refer to Harrogate later as a “melon fancier.”
It should not be that funny.
It is.
Suttree’s ordinary fishing is very different. He is poor, but largely free. He pulls fish from the river and sells them to stores that always seem to want whatever species he does not currently have.
It is survival, but also refuge.
At his son’s grave, work becomes something else again.
Grief has been given a shovel.
And, above all of it sits that passage about the dead being beyond death.
Nothingness is not a curse.
The dead do not remember.
Death is what the living carry.
Suttree’s son is beyond grief.
Suttree is not.
The Living Are Still Ridiculous
It would be easy for a novel containing all this death to become unbearable in the wrong way.
McCarthy instead makes Suttree one of his funniest books.
The bar scenes are consistently hilarious. So are the stores, cheap hotels, card games, jail stories, drunken conversations, insults, failures, arguments, and long stretches involving Harrogate.
Early in the novel there is a crowded backroom scene full of men drinking beer and homemade whiskey and talking over one another. I laughed audibly several times.
That scene demonstrated something else McCarthy can now do.
He can control a room.
Several people can talk, joke, insult one another, interrupt, disappear, reenter, and remain distinct. McCarthy does not need to stop the scene and identify every speaker like pieces on a board.
The voices carry themselves.
Harrogate is perhaps the clearest example of how much better McCarthy has become at balancing comedy against brutality.
He is weak, foolish, racist, frequently disgusting, and almost incapable of commanding respect.
He is also extremely funny.
The joke does not make his circumstances less pitiful.
The pity does not make him more likable.
And, none of it makes the workhouse or poverty or violence around him less brutal.
McCarthy lets incompatible things remain incompatible.
That may sound obvious, but it is extraordinarily difficult to pull off.
People remain vulgar and ridiculous while freezing, grieving, drinking, starving, fighting, and occasionally dying.
In one of the winter stretches, people discuss a man named Cecil who apparently froze to death a year or two earlier.
The room where Cecil died is available again.
Life keeps absorbing its dead.
People keep making jokes.
I could not help noticing the name Cecil because White and Black later use a hypothetical Cecil in The Sunset Limited. I have no idea whether that connection means anything.
But, I noticed it.
Suttree himself rarely laughs.
That absence becomes increasingly important.
He is liked. People call him inside. They feed him. They do not always expect him to pay. They generally respect him despite the way he has chosen to live.
Ab Jones may show that respect better than almost anyone.
Ab is an older Black man who runs an illicit drinking place with his wife, Doll, and becomes one of Suttree’s closest friends. He is physically enormous, angry, proud, frequently targeted by the police, and one of the few people in the novel who seems able to give Suttree a name of his own.
He calls him “Youngblood.”
Most people get Sut or Suttree.
Ab gets Youngblood.
There is something almost fatherly in it.
Ab is also one of the people around whom Suttree does not seem to have to perform anything. He can simply arrive, sit, drink, talk, and be there.
This is part of what continually reminded me of Bobby Western.
Bobby is funny, intelligent, quiet, grief-stricken, and surrounded by people who seem to understand his value better than he does.
Suttree feels like an early version of the same McCarthy figure.
A man who has withdrawn from ordinary life without successfully withdrawing from other people’s affection.
I will have much more to say about Bobby when I get there. The same goes for White, who seems like another related but much harsher branch of this character.
For now, it is enough to notice McCarthy beginning to shape the kind of man he will return to decades later.
Small Mercies
That social affection matters because Suttree contains surprisingly little uncomplicated niceness.
One scene that struck me involves Michael, the Indigenous fisherman Suttree befriends.
Michael prepares a turtle for dinner. They eat together.
That is basically it.
And, because of the novel around it, it feels enormous.
The first time I read the scene, and even again on this listen, I found myself nervous when Michael was not initially where Suttree expected him to be. McCarthy had trained me to treat disappearance as possibly meaning violence or death.
Instead, they eat.
Nobody gives a speech about friendship.
Nobody extracts a lesson.
A man prepares food for another man.
They share it.
Then life goes on.
It is one of the few moments where kindness seems allowed to remain simply kindness.
Polished Cinders
After the death of Suttree’s son, the landscape changes.
Or maybe I started hearing it differently.
The cold becomes enormous.
Knoxville freezes.
Suttree and Harrogate are both reduced to physical survival, even if Suttree retains the dignity and awareness Harrogate so often lacks.
In these stretches Suttree can even seem almost fatherly toward him.
The snow reminded me of The Orchard Keeper.
There, I wrote that McCarthy’s white was not purity. Snow made the landscape ethereal and ghostly, but it also covered things without healing them.
The rot remained underneath.
In Suttree, that ghostliness seems to move inside the character.
The stores and hotels are freezing. Everyone complains. Everyone is uncomfortable.
Everyone still jokes.
Then Suttree walks away from Knoxville and eventually all the way into North Carolina, a journey that is geographically possible but feels increasingly dreamlike as he goes.
The landscape seems to empty.
The narration darkens.
Suttree becomes less solid.
In the woods he encounters a hunter and repeatedly asks the man whether he is real.
I do not think the question is really about the hunter.
Suttree seems unsure whether Suttree is real.
Ghostly was the first word that came to me.
Then dreamlike.
McCarthy briefly shifts into first person during this stretch, using “my” twice in a passage that is otherwise part of the third-person narration.
He does this elsewhere in the novel too.
There are sudden first-person intrusions, along with brief changes in tense. Sometimes those tense changes seem almost attached to the setting itself, as though Knoxville or the land has slipped outside the ordinary chronology of the story.
Suttree draws heavily from McCarthy’s own years in Knoxville, which makes those moments even stranger. I do not think they mean we should simply collapse Suttree into McCarthy.
But, the boundaries among character, narrator, memory, and author occasionally seem to thin.
The novel becomes formally ghostly too.
When Suttree finally boards a bus back toward Knoxville, the other passengers look at him.
Then they look away.
He has become the thing he feared he might be.
An apparition returning to ordinary life.
I woke up in the middle of the night during this listen thinking about him.
The phrase that would not leave my head was “polished cinders.”
It probably describes Alicia Western more cleanly than Suttree. She is brilliance and aftermath almost simultaneously.
But, I kept thinking about it here.
Not only Suttree.
The whole novel.
The frozen landscape. The ruined buildings. The river described at one point in the colors of silt and dung. The dead. The drinkers. The bodies. The cheap rooms. The collapsing lives.
Cinders, all of it.
And, McCarthy polishes them with language until the ruin becomes luminous without becoming less ruined.
Then comes another passage I marked:
“A dark hand had scooped the spirit from his breast, and a cold wind circled in the hollow there. Even the community of the dead had disbanded into ashes. Those shapes wheeling in the earth’s crust through a nameless ether no more men than were the ruins of any other thing once living. Suttree felt the terror coming through the walls.”
That is the cemetery epigraph made experiential.
Death belongs to the living because the living are the ones left hollow.
Even the imagined community of the dead eventually disappears.
There are only ashes.
Temporary Lives
Suttree repeatedly enters lives that do not last.
He receives three hundred dollars after the death of an uncle he cared about.
For Suttree, three hundred dollars is real money.
He immediately spends some of it on clothes, a shave, and a haircut.
Then the money disappears.
He does not use it to stabilize his life.
He does not transform his houseboat into something permanent or build himself a more secure future.
For a little while he simply inhabits the life of someone with money.
Then he does not.
Soon Reese appears.
Reese is the patriarch of a rough river-dwelling family who convinces Suttree that there is money to be made harvesting mussels and finding pearls inside them.
This is odd.
Suttree is far too intelligent and socially aware to seem like an obvious mark for this sort of thing.
Yet he goes.
The pearls turn out to be worth almost nothing.
Again, Suttree has entered a temporary life.
He works.
He lives with Reese’s family.
He becomes part of their little economy and their place along the river.
And, then that life too ends.
I kept wondering whether Suttree actually believes any of these arrangements will last.
I do not think he does.
That may be part of why they feel dreamlike.
He knows something is probably foolish and does it anyway.
He knows something is temporary and enters it anyway.
There is another, even stranger version of this later with Joyce, a prostitute who becomes something like Suttree’s girlfriend.
For a while Suttree is suddenly living well.
There is money.
There are good clothes.
There is an apartment.
There is a car.
Material comfort enters his life almost overnight.
It should feel like advancement.
Instead it feels fake.
Not because Joyce is fake. She is one of the people making this life materially possible.
The life itself feels borrowed.
Suttree inhabits prosperity the way he inhabits so many other things in the novel: completely enough to experience it, but never convincingly enough to believe it will remain.
He seems to know the whole time that this is another span.
And, eventually it falls apart.
This is where the dream logic of the novel and Suttree’s diminished concern for consequence begin to feel almost indistinguishable.
Maybe reality itself has become strange.
Maybe grief has made Suttree sufficiently detached that he no longer cares whether his decisions make sense.
Probably both.
His life becomes a collection of temporary spans.
Fishing.
Bars.
Harrogate.
Money.
Pearls.
Reese.
Joyce.
Comfort.
Poverty again.
Winter.
Summer.
Grief.
One life briefly replacing another before dissolving.
All lives are temporary spans, of course.
Most of us simply build enough continuity around them to pretend otherwise.
Suttree barely bothers.
And, the seasons do not rescue him.
Winter returns and everything seems to be closing down.
Then summer comes.
The heat does not thaw anything.
Ab Jones and the Community of the Dead
Ab’s death matters because by then we understand how rare his particular relationship with Suttree is.
Ab has repeatedly been brutalized by the police, but he refuses to become deferential to them. His dignity is not polite. It is angry, stubborn, dangerous, and eventually costly.
Toward the end of the novel, that conflict finally destroys him.
Ab dies after another violent encounter with the police.
The only man who can call Suttree “Youngblood” is gone.
By this point death is no longer an exceptional event in the novel.
It has accumulated.
The suicide by the river.
Suttree’s son.
Cecil.
Others who vanish, die violently, or simply disappear from the world Suttree has known.
Ab.
The “community of the dead” from the earlier narration no longer feels like an abstraction.
Then Suttree nearly joins it.
In the final stretch he becomes terribly ill and drifts into a state where fever, dream, memory, death, and narration are increasingly difficult to separate.
And, there he seems to commune with the dead.
People from his Knoxville life who have died appear again. The boundaries collapse. The community that the narration had earlier said was disbanded into ashes seems, impossibly, to reassemble around him.
At least in Suttree’s mind.
Or dream.
Or fever.
Or whatever state McCarthy has brought us into by then.
I noticed that Ab is not among them.
I do not know what to make of that, and I do not want to pretend the omission must carry some secret answer.
But, I noticed it.
That is the kind of novel this is.
You notice absences too.
Alive or Dead or Dreaming
The final chapter is where McCarthy seems to pull out everything he has learned.
The language becomes staggering.
But, plot does not disappear beneath it.
Character does not disappear beneath it.
Setting certainly does not.
Knoxville has become something alive and dead at once.
By the end, the city is not merely where Suttree has lived. It has accumulated people, deaths, ruined buildings, rivers, taverns, stores, rooms, alleys, voices, seasons, memories, and disappearances until it seems capable of existing independently of him.
And, then parts of it begin literally disappearing.
The world Suttree has inhabited is being dismantled.
That physical destruction feels inseparable from the deaths and departures around him.
Even his own houseboat becomes part of the confusion between Suttree and death.
Someone dies there.
For a moment the world can reasonably mistake that corpse for Suttree’s.
Maybe that is fitting.
Suttree has spent so much of the novel wandering at the border.
Living and dead.
Present and absent.
Solid and ghostly.
Sober and drunk.
Awake and dreaming.
McCarthy refuses to make the ending completely stable.
Suttree survives.
Probably that is the simplest factual way to put it.
But, the narration has made survival itself feel stranger than that.
He has passed close enough to death that the dead have become conversational again.
The city he knew is disappearing.
The people who constituted it are dead, gone, imprisoned, scattered.
Then Suttree gets on.
That phrase again.
Only this time he actually leaves.
A Bend in the Work
By the final chapter, McCarthy is doing almost everything at once.
The language becomes mythic.
The point of view shifts.
The tense shifts.
First person appears inside third.
Dream and reality touch.
The city develops.
Suttree develops.
People die.
People remain funny.
None of these things require the others to stop.
That is why Suttree feels like the beginning of the mature McCarthy to me.
Not because The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Child of God were preliminary exercises.
They were not.
I love those books.
The progression is subtler than that.
In the first novel, the music could occasionally overwhelm the scene.
Outer Dark narrowed the nightmare and gained control.
Child of God became leaner and more precise while still experimenting with tense, narration, comedy, and perspective.
Suttree does something harder.
It gets loose again without losing control.
McCarthy can wander.
He can spend pages describing a landscape in language I know I do not fully understand and still make me want to remain inside it.
He can fill a room with drunken voices and keep every one of them alive.
He can make Harrogate ridiculous without making suffering ridiculous.
He can make Ab larger than life and still let death take him.
He can give Michael and Suttree a quiet meal without turning kindness into sentimentality.
He can shift person and tense.
He can move from metaphysical terror into a filthy joke.
He can bury a child and then return us to bars, fish, meals, cold rooms, work, friendship, sex, stupidity, warmth, and absurdity.
He can make Knoxville feel mythic without making it stop being Knoxville.
The abundance is no longer fighting the novel.
The abundance is the novel.
That does not make Suttree automatically better than everything before it, and it does not make it the greatest book McCarthy will write.
It means something simpler.
By this point, the whole instrument is available to him.
And, next comes Blood Meridian.
I already know I consider it one of his masterpieces. I know it permanently changed what I thought prose could do.
I also have almost no idea how to describe it.
After Suttree, that feels like an appropriate problem to have.
What the Living Carry
“How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory. But the dead do not remember, and nothingness is not a curse. Far from it.”
— Cormac McCarthy, Suttree
The Music Arrives Whole
I knew almost immediately.
That sounds unfair to the three novels before Suttree, all of which I admire, and one of the pleasures of this project has been discovering just how much of Cormac McCarthy was already there from the beginning.The Orchard Keeper Keeps the Rot was partly about that astonishment: the language, darkness, comedy, landscape, violence, and mythic pressure were already present, even when they sometimes competed for space.
I called it McCarthy before he had fully mastered McCarthy.
What Cannot Be Named, my essay on Outer Dark, found the control tightening. The nightmare had cleaner edges. Dialogue became more important. Plot and prose began serving the same terrible design.
ThenBuried With the Name of Man found Child of God becoming leaner still. McCarthy could shift tense deliberately, move from grotesque comedy into atrocity, and build Lester Ballard from gestures and objects rather than explanation.
All of those books remain great to me.
But, Suttree feels like a bend in the work.
Not a turning point exactly. Nothing before it needs to be discarded, and nothing after it suddenly belongs to an entirely different writer. I am not even sure I would call Suttree McCarthy’s best novel, despite everything I am about to say about it.
It feels instead like the beginning of his mature period.
The difference is not that the experimentation stops.
It is that the experimentation has stopped sounding like uncertainty.
From the opening pages, the language is music. I mean that almost literally. Listening to the audiobook, there were long passages I knew I could rewind and hear again, then rewind again, and still probably fail to account for everything happening inside them. The sentences describe rivers, mud, buildings, bodies, darkness, animals, ruined streets, cold, summer heat, and the old life of Knoxville until description itself begins to feel mythic.
Eventually I stopped trying to catch all of it.
There was too much.
I took fewer notes on Suttree than on the previous novels, not because there was less to notice, but because stopping to name everything began to feel like stepping out of the river.
That became its own kind of note.
There are books I want to understand by taking them apart. With Suttree, I increasingly wanted to let the book remain assembled around me. Some passages were obviously doing more than I could grasp in a single listen. I could have spent hours pulling apart images, syntax, religious language, shifts in perspective, and descriptions of the land.
Instead I sometimes just acknowledged the thing.
This is beautiful.
This is doing something to me.
Keep going.
The Dead by the River
The river is already there when we properly meet Cornelius Suttree.
He is fishing when he and other fishermen encounter the body of a man, presumably a suicide. Someone has thrown a rough covering over him, but his feet remain exposed.
Then Suttree notices his watch.
The man wears it turned inward on his wrist, and the watch may still be ticking.
That image stayed with me. The body has stopped. The mechanism has not. Time continues measuring itself against someone for whom measurement no longer matters.
McCarthy then immediately starts showing us what kind of man Suttree is.
An older man offers him food. Suttree knows in advance that the offer will come three times.
It does.
This is not the intellectual brilliance McCarthy will later give Alicia Western in Stella Maris. Suttree does not announce his intelligence. He reads people. He understands ritual. He knows when someone is being polite, when someone actually wants something, and when a conversation has reached its natural end.
There is another strange moment when Suttree tells his uncle that he remembers his father. His uncle points out that Suttree was only a baby.
Suttree knows.
He remembers anyway.
I thought of Alicia there too. Not because Suttree is Alicia-level brilliant or because McCarthy is making some claim about impossible infant memory that I can neatly explain, but because both characters seem suspicious of ordinary boundaries around what a mind is allowed to know.
Alicia argues those boundaries to pieces.
Suttree simply says he remembers.
I will have much more to say about Alicia when I get to Stella Maris, just as I will about Bobby Western in The Passenger. I intend to write about those two novels together because, to me, they are two halves of the same thing.
For now, the resemblance is worth noting.
Suttree’s intelligence is quieter.
It shows up in attention.
Who Gets Suttree’s Time
More than once, someone tells Suttree that he has to get on, and Suttree lets him.
More than once, Suttree says essentially the same thing and is allowed to leave.
That phrase caught me because McCarthy has already used versions of it elsewhere. Culla repeatedly has to get on in Outer Dark, usually because remaining somewhere would mean becoming answerable.
The words barely change.
The person saying them changes everything.
Suttree usually understands what another person’s time belongs to. He talks briefly with boys who are fishing because he seems genuinely interested. He could keep walking. He does not. For whatever reason, those boys and their fishing are worth a few minutes.
J-Bone, one of Suttree’s old friends and regular drinking companions, calls to him from inside as he passes.
Suttree goes in.
That seems small until you notice how often Suttree does not allow himself to be detained. J-Bone is someone who gets to interrupt him.
J-Bone is also the one who passes along the message that Suttree’s father wants him to call.
Suttree refuses.
That refusal immediately reminded me of White in The Sunset Limited, refusing to visit his father while the man is dying of cancer. The circumstances are different, and I do not want to flatten the two characters into one, but McCarthy seems drawn to men whose estrangement from their fathers is so complete that even the rituals surrounding death do not necessarily break it.
I will have much more to say about White and Black when I eventually reach The Sunset Limited.
Harrogate is almost Suttree’s opposite in these social exchanges.
Gene Harrogate is the young man Suttree meets in the workhouse, an impoverished, socially oblivious figure who has landed there after his infamous trouble involving watermelons. He will later become known as the “midnight melon mounter,” which is somehow both humiliating and extremely funny.
Harrogate often does not understand when a conversation is over.
Later, when he gets a miserable little apartment in Knoxville, Suttree shows genuine interest in the place. Suttree eventually says he needs to leave, but Harrogate simply keeps talking.
Suttree stays.
Partly, Harrogate has failed to read the cue.
But, Suttree also seems interested enough to allow him to fail.
The contrast keeps sharpening. Harrogate does not understand social boundaries. Suttree understands them almost instinctively.
Then, much later, after some of the darkest narration in the novel, another man says he has to get on.
Suttree asks him to stay.
By then the phrase means something else entirely.
Do not leave me alone with this.
Graves Again
I have somehow ended up writing about graves in every one of these essays.
That seems appropriate.
In The Orchard Keeper, the grave becomes pit, altar, ash, evidence, and finally part of a much larger continuity in which even figures like Tut and Agamemnon are reduced by death.
In Outer Dark, graves fail to keep what is placed inside them.
In Child of God, Lester Ballard is eventually returned to the earth after even his body has been opened and examined.
Then Suttree gives me the grave that hurt the most.
The call Suttree refuses to make concerns his son.
The child is dead.
At the funeral, Suttree hangs apart from the others. Then, after everyone else has left, he wants the grave filled immediately. The cemetery workers are apparently waiting for machinery.
Suttree takes a shovel and does it himself.
This is not the Suttree we have known.
He has been observant, socially adept, detached, frequently drunk, sometimes reckless, and often difficult to locate emotionally. He is surrounded by funny people but rarely seems to laugh himself.
Here he is sorrowful in a way he has not allowed himself to be anywhere else.
And, suddenly the corpse by the river returns.
That stranger had been covered incompletely, his feet still showing beneath the blanket.
Suttree will not leave his own son uncovered.
Work has changed too.
Culla works because circumstance or punishment forces him to. Lester discovers that jail can provide more dependable food than freedom.
Harrogate later steals a hog because he wants to eat it, kills it in a prolonged and brutal way, and is caught by the Black man who owns it. The owner offers him a way to work off the ten-dollar debt.
Harrogate immediately asks what the hourly wage will be.
Fifty cents.
He tries for seventy-five.
He is ignored.
Then he resents the work almost from the beginning, even though he is also being fed.
The whole thing is pitiful because Harrogate seems perpetually capable of creating the conditions of his own humiliation and then experiencing himself mainly as their victim. His racism makes the episode uglier still. The man he despises has given him a practical way to repay something Harrogate unquestionably stole.
And, McCarthy still finds room to refer to Harrogate later as a “melon fancier.”
It should not be that funny.
It is.
Suttree’s ordinary fishing is very different. He is poor, but largely free. He pulls fish from the river and sells them to stores that always seem to want whatever species he does not currently have.
It is survival, but also refuge.
At his son’s grave, work becomes something else again.
Grief has been given a shovel.
And, above all of it sits that passage about the dead being beyond death.
Nothingness is not a curse.
The dead do not remember.
Death is what the living carry.
Suttree’s son is beyond grief.
Suttree is not.
The Living Are Still Ridiculous
It would be easy for a novel containing all this death to become unbearable in the wrong way.
McCarthy instead makes Suttree one of his funniest books.
The bar scenes are consistently hilarious. So are the stores, cheap hotels, card games, jail stories, drunken conversations, insults, failures, arguments, and long stretches involving Harrogate.
Early in the novel there is a crowded backroom scene full of men drinking beer and homemade whiskey and talking over one another. I laughed audibly several times.
That scene demonstrated something else McCarthy can now do.
He can control a room.
Several people can talk, joke, insult one another, interrupt, disappear, reenter, and remain distinct. McCarthy does not need to stop the scene and identify every speaker like pieces on a board.
The voices carry themselves.
Harrogate is perhaps the clearest example of how much better McCarthy has become at balancing comedy against brutality.
He is weak, foolish, racist, frequently disgusting, and almost incapable of commanding respect.
He is also extremely funny.
The joke does not make his circumstances less pitiful.
The pity does not make him more likable.
And, none of it makes the workhouse or poverty or violence around him less brutal.
McCarthy lets incompatible things remain incompatible.
That may sound obvious, but it is extraordinarily difficult to pull off.
People remain vulgar and ridiculous while freezing, grieving, drinking, starving, fighting, and occasionally dying.
In one of the winter stretches, people discuss a man named Cecil who apparently froze to death a year or two earlier.
The room where Cecil died is available again.
Life keeps absorbing its dead.
People keep making jokes.
I could not help noticing the name Cecil because White and Black later use a hypothetical Cecil in The Sunset Limited. I have no idea whether that connection means anything.
But, I noticed it.
Suttree himself rarely laughs.
That absence becomes increasingly important.
He is liked. People call him inside. They feed him. They do not always expect him to pay. They generally respect him despite the way he has chosen to live.
Ab Jones may show that respect better than almost anyone.
Ab is an older Black man who runs an illicit drinking place with his wife, Doll, and becomes one of Suttree’s closest friends. He is physically enormous, angry, proud, frequently targeted by the police, and one of the few people in the novel who seems able to give Suttree a name of his own.
He calls him “Youngblood.”
Most people get Sut or Suttree.
Ab gets Youngblood.
There is something almost fatherly in it.
Ab is also one of the people around whom Suttree does not seem to have to perform anything. He can simply arrive, sit, drink, talk, and be there.
This is part of what continually reminded me of Bobby Western.
Bobby is funny, intelligent, quiet, grief-stricken, and surrounded by people who seem to understand his value better than he does.
Suttree feels like an early version of the same McCarthy figure.
A man who has withdrawn from ordinary life without successfully withdrawing from other people’s affection.
I will have much more to say about Bobby when I get there. The same goes for White, who seems like another related but much harsher branch of this character.
For now, it is enough to notice McCarthy beginning to shape the kind of man he will return to decades later.
Small Mercies
That social affection matters because Suttree contains surprisingly little uncomplicated niceness.
One scene that struck me involves Michael, the Indigenous fisherman Suttree befriends.
Michael prepares a turtle for dinner. They eat together.
That is basically it.
And, because of the novel around it, it feels enormous.
The first time I read the scene, and even again on this listen, I found myself nervous when Michael was not initially where Suttree expected him to be. McCarthy had trained me to treat disappearance as possibly meaning violence or death.
Instead, they eat.
Nobody gives a speech about friendship.
Nobody extracts a lesson.
A man prepares food for another man.
They share it.
Then life goes on.
It is one of the few moments where kindness seems allowed to remain simply kindness.
Polished Cinders
After the death of Suttree’s son, the landscape changes.
Or maybe I started hearing it differently.
The cold becomes enormous.
Knoxville freezes.
Suttree and Harrogate are both reduced to physical survival, even if Suttree retains the dignity and awareness Harrogate so often lacks.
In these stretches Suttree can even seem almost fatherly toward him.
The snow reminded me of The Orchard Keeper.
There, I wrote that McCarthy’s white was not purity. Snow made the landscape ethereal and ghostly, but it also covered things without healing them.
The rot remained underneath.
In Suttree, that ghostliness seems to move inside the character.
The stores and hotels are freezing. Everyone complains. Everyone is uncomfortable.
Everyone still jokes.
Then Suttree walks away from Knoxville and eventually all the way into North Carolina, a journey that is geographically possible but feels increasingly dreamlike as he goes.
The landscape seems to empty.
The narration darkens.
Suttree becomes less solid.
In the woods he encounters a hunter and repeatedly asks the man whether he is real.
I do not think the question is really about the hunter.
Suttree seems unsure whether Suttree is real.
Ghostly was the first word that came to me.
Then dreamlike.
McCarthy briefly shifts into first person during this stretch, using “my” twice in a passage that is otherwise part of the third-person narration.
He does this elsewhere in the novel too.
There are sudden first-person intrusions, along with brief changes in tense. Sometimes those tense changes seem almost attached to the setting itself, as though Knoxville or the land has slipped outside the ordinary chronology of the story.
Suttree draws heavily from McCarthy’s own years in Knoxville, which makes those moments even stranger. I do not think they mean we should simply collapse Suttree into McCarthy.
But, the boundaries among character, narrator, memory, and author occasionally seem to thin.
The novel becomes formally ghostly too.
When Suttree finally boards a bus back toward Knoxville, the other passengers look at him.
Then they look away.
He has become the thing he feared he might be.
An apparition returning to ordinary life.
I woke up in the middle of the night during this listen thinking about him.
The phrase that would not leave my head was “polished cinders.”
It probably describes Alicia Western more cleanly than Suttree. She is brilliance and aftermath almost simultaneously.
But, I kept thinking about it here.
Not only Suttree.
The whole novel.
The frozen landscape. The ruined buildings. The river described at one point in the colors of silt and dung. The dead. The drinkers. The bodies. The cheap rooms. The collapsing lives.
Cinders, all of it.
And, McCarthy polishes them with language until the ruin becomes luminous without becoming less ruined.
Then comes another passage I marked:
“A dark hand had scooped the spirit from his breast, and a cold wind circled in the hollow there. Even the community of the dead had disbanded into ashes. Those shapes wheeling in the earth’s crust through a nameless ether no more men than were the ruins of any other thing once living. Suttree felt the terror coming through the walls.”
That is the cemetery epigraph made experiential.
Death belongs to the living because the living are the ones left hollow.
Even the imagined community of the dead eventually disappears.
There are only ashes.
Temporary Lives
Suttree repeatedly enters lives that do not last.
He receives three hundred dollars after the death of an uncle he cared about.
For Suttree, three hundred dollars is real money.
He immediately spends some of it on clothes, a shave, and a haircut.
Then the money disappears.
He does not use it to stabilize his life.
He does not transform his houseboat into something permanent or build himself a more secure future.
For a little while he simply inhabits the life of someone with money.
Then he does not.
Soon Reese appears.
Reese is the patriarch of a rough river-dwelling family who convinces Suttree that there is money to be made harvesting mussels and finding pearls inside them.
This is odd.
Suttree is far too intelligent and socially aware to seem like an obvious mark for this sort of thing.
Yet he goes.
The pearls turn out to be worth almost nothing.
Again, Suttree has entered a temporary life.
He works.
He lives with Reese’s family.
He becomes part of their little economy and their place along the river.
And, then that life too ends.
I kept wondering whether Suttree actually believes any of these arrangements will last.
I do not think he does.
That may be part of why they feel dreamlike.
He knows something is probably foolish and does it anyway.
He knows something is temporary and enters it anyway.
There is another, even stranger version of this later with Joyce, a prostitute who becomes something like Suttree’s girlfriend.
For a while Suttree is suddenly living well.
There is money.
There are good clothes.
There is an apartment.
There is a car.
Material comfort enters his life almost overnight.
It should feel like advancement.
Instead it feels fake.
Not because Joyce is fake. She is one of the people making this life materially possible.
The life itself feels borrowed.
Suttree inhabits prosperity the way he inhabits so many other things in the novel: completely enough to experience it, but never convincingly enough to believe it will remain.
He seems to know the whole time that this is another span.
And, eventually it falls apart.
This is where the dream logic of the novel and Suttree’s diminished concern for consequence begin to feel almost indistinguishable.
Maybe reality itself has become strange.
Maybe grief has made Suttree sufficiently detached that he no longer cares whether his decisions make sense.
Probably both.
His life becomes a collection of temporary spans.
Fishing.
Bars.
Harrogate.
Money.
Pearls.
Reese.
Joyce.
Comfort.
Poverty again.
Winter.
Summer.
Grief.
One life briefly replacing another before dissolving.
All lives are temporary spans, of course.
Most of us simply build enough continuity around them to pretend otherwise.
Suttree barely bothers.
And, the seasons do not rescue him.
Winter returns and everything seems to be closing down.
Then summer comes.
The heat does not thaw anything.
Ab Jones and the Community of the Dead
Ab’s death matters because by then we understand how rare his particular relationship with Suttree is.
Ab has repeatedly been brutalized by the police, but he refuses to become deferential to them. His dignity is not polite. It is angry, stubborn, dangerous, and eventually costly.
Toward the end of the novel, that conflict finally destroys him.
Ab dies after another violent encounter with the police.
The onlh man who can call Suttree “Youngblood” is gone.
By this point death is no longer an exceptional event in the novel.
It has accumulated.
The suicide by the river.
Suttree’s son.
Cecil.
Others who vanish, die violently, or simply disappear from the world Suttree has known.
Ab.
The “community of the dead” from the earlier narration no longer feels like an abstraction.
Then Suttree nearly joins it.
In the final stretch he becomes terribly ill and drifts into a state where fever, dream, memory, death, and narration are increasingly difficult to separate.
And, there he seems to commune with the dead.
People from his Knoxville life who have died appear again. The boundaries collapse. The community that the narration had earlier said was disbanded into ashes seems, impossibly, to reassemble around him.
At least in Suttree’s mind.
Or dream.
Or fever.
Or whatever state McCarthy has brought us into by then.
I noticed that Ab is not among them.
I do not know what to make of that, and I do not want to pretend the omission must carry some secret answer.
But, I noticed it.
That is the kind of novel this is.
You notice absences too.
Alive or Dead or Dreaming
The final chapter is where McCarthy seems to pull out everything he has learned.
The language becomes staggering.
But, plot does not disappear beneath it.
Character does not disappear beneath it.
Setting certainly does not.
Knoxville has become something alive and dead at once.
By the end, the city is not merely where Suttree has lived. It has accumulated people, deaths, ruined buildings, rivers, taverns, stores, rooms, alleys, voices, seasons, memories, and disappearances until it seems capable of existing independently of him.
And, then parts of it begin literally disappearing.
The world Suttree has inhabited is being dismantled.
That physical destruction feels inseparable from the deaths and departures around him.
Even his own houseboat becomes part of the confusion between Suttree and death.
Someone dies there.
For a moment the world can reasonably mistake that corpse for Suttree’s.
Maybe that is fitting.
Suttree has spent so much of the novel wandering at the border.
Living and dead.
Present and absent.
Solid and ghostly.
Sober and drunk.
Awake and dreaming.
McCarthy refuses to make the ending completely stable.
Suttree survives.
Probably that is the simplest factual way to put it.
But, the narration has made survival itself feel stranger than that.
He has passed close enough to death that the dead have become conversational again.
The city he knew is disappearing.
The people who constituted it are dead, gone, imprisoned, scattered.
Then Suttree gets on.
That phrase again.
Only this time he actually leaves.
A Bend in the Work
By the final chapter, McCarthy is doing almost everything at once.
The language becomes mythic.
The point of view shifts.
The tense shifts.
First person appears inside third.
Dream and reality touch.
The city develops.
Suttree develops.
People die.
People remain funny.
None of these things require the others to stop.
That is why Suttree feels like the beginning of the mature McCarthy to me.
Not because The Orchard Keeper, Outer Dark, and Child of God were preliminary exercises.
They were not.
I love those books.
The progression is subtler than that.
In the first novel, the music could occasionally overwhelm the scene.
Outer Dark narrowed the nightmare and gained control.
Child of God became leaner and more precise while still experimenting with tense, narration, comedy, and perspective.
Suttree does something harder.
It gets loose again without losing control.
McCarthy can wander.
He can spend pages describing a landscape in language I know I do not fully understand and still make me want to remain inside it.
He can fill a room with drunken voices and keep every one of them alive.
He can make Harrogate ridiculous without making suffering ridiculous.
He can make Ab larger than life and still let death take him.
He can give Michael and Suttree a quiet meal without turning kindness into sentimentality.
He can shift person and tense.
He can move from metaphysical terror into a filthy joke.
He can bury a child and then return us to bars, fish, meals, cold rooms, work, friendship, sex, stupidity, warmth, and absurdity.
He can make Knoxville feel mythic without making it stop being Knoxville.
The abundance is no longer fighting the novel.
The abundance is the novel.
That does not make Suttree automatically better than everything before it, and it does not make it the greatest book McCarthy will write.
It means something simpler.
By this point, the whole instrument is available to him.
And, next comes Blood Meridian.
I already know I consider it one of his masterpieces. I know it permanently changed what I thought prose could do.
I also have almost no idea how to describe it.
After Suttree, that feels like an appropriate problem to have.
Rivers contain
Everything we tend to miss
Bending onward
