Suttree
First edition
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| Author | Cormac McCarthy |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Semi-Autobiographical novel |
| Publisher | Random House |
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Publication date
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May 1979 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 26322333 |
Suttree is a semi-autobiographical novel by Cormac McCarthy, published in 1979. Set in 1951 in Knoxville, Tennessee, 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 version" of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.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 novel begins with Suttree observing police as they pull a suicide victim from the river. Suttree is living alone in a houseboat, on the fringes of society on the Tennessee River, earning money by fishing for the occasional catfish. He has left a life of luxury, rejecting his father and family, and abandoning his wife and son.
A large cast of characters, largely and grotesques, is introduced, one of which is Gene Harrogate, whom Suttree meets in a work camp. Harrogate was sent to the work camp for "violating" a farmer's watermelons. (Harrogate is referred to as the "moonlight melonmounter.") Suttree attempts to help Harrogate once he is released from the work camp, but this task proves to be in vain as Harrogate sets off on a series of misadventures, including using poisoned meat and a slingshot to kill bats ("flitter-mice" as Harrogate calls them) to earn a bounty on them, and using dynamite to attempt to tunnel underneath the city. Other prominent characters are prostitutes, hermits, and an aged Geechee witch.
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