Suttree

The test is subtractive, and here the book is weakest. There is no plot spine: the novel runs as episodes over some years, and many could go without the book losing a fact it needs. One more drunk, one more brawl at the Indian Rocks or in a bar on the Flats, one more of Harrogate’s schemes: the book has more of each than its argument requires. What resists the test is the accumulation itself, which is the argument, since a descent chosen again each day can be shown only by repetition. The episodes that bear the weight are few and fixed: the drowned man, the workhouse, the son’s funeral, the Reese camp, the mountains, Ab Jones’s death, the fever, the departure. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the rest: perhaps a quarter of the book is permitted rather than compelled.

Score: 7.7 / 10

The disclosure can be stated. A man born to the class that runs the city has gone down among those it discards, fishermen, ragpickers, Black bootleggers, drunks, a transvestite, a witch, a boy who sleeps in a culvert, and the book shows that the life down there is a life, comic, loyal and full, and not a fall from a better one. His father’s letter tells him, in substance, that nothing happens in the streets and that life is in the courts and in government; the novel is the answer. The second disclosure is death: the book opens on a drowned man and closes on a corpse in Suttree’s bed, and between them a man learns that he is one thing and not two. Held a tenth under the bar because much of what the book gives is a world rendered, the mood of an outcast city, more than a meaning articulated, and why Suttree went down is held back.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Height is reached often and in more than one key. The dreadful: a drowned man brought up with a grappling hook before a watching crowd in the opening pages; the rockslide that kills Wanda in the rain at the Reese camp, and her father’s grief; the son’s grave. The grand: the passage alone in the Smoky Mountains, where hunger and solitude break into vision, and the river in flood and fog through every season. The comic sublime, rarer in literature, is here: Harrogate raises slapstick to a kind of grandeur, and his tunnel under the city toward a bank vault, ending in a burst of sewage, is a descent into the underworld played for laughs. The close rises again on the huntsman’s hounds that “tire not”. Held below 9.0 because the elevation is so constant in register that it sometimes flattens, and the prose reaches for height in passages that have not earned it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Myth is built in two places and evoked in many. Built: the twin. Suttree’s brother was born dead, and the living man carries the dead one as a shadow self through the book; the fever that nearly kills him near the end is where the doubleness is resolved, and he comes out of it as one. Built also: the descent and return. The workhouse, the river city, the tunnels under the streets and the mountains make an underworld, and the man presumed dead at the end, his bed taken by a corpse, leaves the city as one risen. The huntsman of the prologue and the close, with hounds that hunt souls, frames the whole. Evoked: the fisher, the black water, the witch Mother She, the sacred fool in Harrogate. Held a tenth under the bar because between the built pillars the archetype rides on the prose’s atmosphere more than on the structure, and much of the middle is picaresque without mythic load.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The inheritance is plain and heavy: Faulkner’s South and his sentence; Joyce’s Ulysses, with its city walked, its young man who has refused his inheritance and its comic life of the low; Agee’s Knoxville; the Southern Gothic of O’Connor. The turn is real. The book took the Southern novel off the farm and out of family history into a city slum, made its hero a man who chose the slum, and built a long novel without a plot from a life’s days, in a prose that joins the Joycean catalogue to a King James cadence and a dictionary’s rarities. The stake was real: a long book without a plot, published in a decade that rewarded neither length nor this kind of difficulty. Held below the bar because the departure is one of degree from two masters who are always audible, and the greater break in its author’s work came after it.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Change the form and the book loses much of what it knows. A plotted novel of this material would have made Suttree’s life a story with a climax and a moral; the episodic form says the life has no plot, that it is days, that the river carries everything past and returns nothing. The unnumbered sections, running into one another, are the river’s form. The italic frame, addressed to a “Dear friend” and closing on the huntsman, sets the whole as a vision of a city of the living and the dead, and makes a departure the only exit the form allows. The density of the prose is the instrument of attention, the refusal to let any discarded thing go unnamed. Held off the top because the form is in part a container: the middle takes episodes by accretion, and another order of them would not change what the book knows.

Score: 8.3 / 10

Evidence, not only promise: forty-seven years of reading and a critical literature that has grown rather than closed, from the first studies of McCarthy in the 1980s and 1990s through the work gathered around the Cormac McCarthy Society and its journal to the reconsiderations after his death in 2023. The questions stay open: whether Suttree’s descent is a moral act or a long evasion; whether the corpse in his bed is the death of the old Suttree or only a stranger; who the huntsman is, death or God or the world’s predation; what the book makes of the father’s letter, which it never answers in words. The form yields on return too, in echoes left across the book’s length for the reader to find: the drowned man and the corpse, the twin and the fever. Held a step down because the critical return is concentrated among its author’s readers.

Score: 8.5 / 10

The field is the American novel of the 1970s, and the Southern novel within it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book carried the inheritance of Faulkner and Joyce to a last full height in the city, showed that the language of the Southern novel could hold the lowest life of the modern South without condescension, and is the summit of its author’s Appalachian manner. But it consummates an inheritance more than it reorganises possibility, and in 1979 the reorganisations of the American novel were being made elsewhere. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: a reach that came late, after Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy made its author’s name, and is now strong among novelists and readers of literary fiction, with a presence of its own in Knoxville. The delay is credited and discounted, and the reach stays narrower than the force.

Score: 7.9 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-seven years, on what has been shown. The text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print since the Random House first edition of 1979, through the paperback reissues of the 1990s and after; it is translated into the major European languages. Its surface is fixed to a place and time, the Knoxville of the early 1950s that urban renewal and the expressway destroyed, but the book is itself about that destruction, and it is read more now than when those conditions passed. What holds the axis at the bar is presence: the book is read by its author’s readers and by readers of Southern literature, studied in the academy and more read since 2023, but its readership is narrower than that of his later novels and it is not read in schools at large.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on McCarthy’s English, with no translation between. The sentence is the book’s great instrument: long periodic runs of concrete nouns, the King James parataxis of “and” upon “and”, rare words used exactly, and dialogue without marks that holds a dozen voices apart, the Black speech of the Flats, Harrogate’s country idiom, the lawyer’s prose of the father’s letter. The scenes are as exactly made: the drowned man raised from the river, the workhouse, the Reese camp, the hospital. The comic timing of Harrogate’s episodes is as exact as the elegy elsewhere. Charged: the vocabulary sometimes turns to display, a rare word chosen where a plain one would carry more; the descriptive set pieces repeat their effects; and the structure, a run of episodes, is less commanded than the sentence. At this height the making must bear the book, and here it largely does.

Score: 8.9 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: Harrogate in the melon patch, a slapstick of the body, and Wanda dead under the fallen ledge, a tragedy of the earth. One law holds both: the body and the earth take everything, and what lives is what persists, laughing or grieving, in the time it has. Harrogate’s comedy obeys the same physics as the river’s drowned men; his schemes end in the jail and the sewer as surely as the river ends in its dead. The range is wide and held: the workhouse and the mountains, the bars and the remembered Catholic childhood, the Black quarter and the father’s study. Charged: the mountain vision and the fever’s delirium turn the book’s law toward the hallucinatory without full preparation, and some episodes stand in the book on the strength of their prose rather than of the law.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Many orders, held rather than listed. Consciousness: Suttree’s solitude, guilt and fear of death, the twin, the fever. The family: the dead son, the abandoned wife, the mother, the uncle who drinks, the father’s letter, and the Reeses as a family he enters and loses. Labour: fishing the river for a living, the mussel gathering, ragpicking, the workhouse. The state: the police who beat Ab Jones to death, the workhouse, the courts, the city that bulldozes the Flats for an expressway. History: the Knoxville of the early 1950s, its slum and its end. The sacred: the Catholic boyhood, the church, the priest at the sickbed, the huntsman. The natural order: the river through every season, the mountains, the bats Harrogate poisons, the fish. All of it passes through one man walking a city. Held a step down because the state and history stand as ground more than as agents.

Score: 8.7 / 10