Nope, clearly not my cup of tea. I don’t want to haggle on the stylistic mastery of McCarthy. Take the introductory description, at the start, for instance: an overwhelming accumulation of nouns and adjectives, reminding of Clifford Geertz’ “thick description”, if only for the cheap alliteration effects and the ostentatious showing off particular, rarely used vocabulary. And then there’s the very minimalistic story, the taciturn protagonist, the often very clichéd other characters, and the loaden conversations, like a mix of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. No, as said, not for me.

Not rating this, because I simply could not wade through any more of this crap. I made it to 17% in the audiobook, which is about 7% more than I give most books, but you know, it's this genius of McCarthy that I keep hearing about, but not really seeing.

So, here's my take on the first four books he wrote.

1 - He chooses poor, lower class, southern characters.
2 - Those characters say, "Well." a lot.
3 - He loves to show these characters in their most depraved light. Expect pages and pages of this.
4 - He'll also detail everything they do to death. Someone wants a smoke? Expect a page of them fishing the pack out, opening the pack, teasing out a cigarette, placing the cigarette between lips, fishing about for a match, lighting the match, bringing the flame to the cigarette, puffing on the cigarette, shaking the match out, discarding the match, and then smoking the cigarette. Expect effusive descriptions of all of the above, and also a circular, repetitive conversation to be going at the same time that means nothing, leads nowhere, and the smoker and whomever they're talking to will separate without the story moving forward a single inch.

Yes, his prose is pretty. He can absolutely turn a phrase. But what's it all mean? There's no story here, just a series of mostly meaningless anecdotes. By the time I got to Suttree puking, wiping it on the curtains, then falling asleep under a bed, all to virtually poetic phrasing, I was out.

Honestly, I feel like I've gone to one of those expensive, snooty restaurants where the menu is in a virtually foreign language and, after an interminable wait, my meal comes, but it's a large place with a paper-thin sliver of underdone meat, and an artfully carved curl of onion, with some sort of colourful sauce delicately arced over everything to hide the fact that there's basically nothing here. I'd leave feeling hungry and like I've invested far too much in far too little.

The next book in line is Blood Meridian, and I've heard better things about that (translation: this one may actually have a plot), so I'll give that one a shot. But if it's just more of the same, I'm out.

A tale of life on the margins of society and life itself. The vocabulary alone makes it worth a read. ( )

Like Leopold Bloom in Knoxville, the protagnoist Suttree, who seems to have grown up in better circumstances, has episodic adventures and encounters with the common people of Eastern Tennessee. McCarthy alternates his stripped down punctuation-less dialogue and detailed listing of simple actions with rich prose poetry that is often describing offal, vermin, decadence, the inebriated and death. All in all, it’s fascinating, inspired and brilliant. McCarthy seems to either understand his talents unusually well or he is very fortunate that his writing style fits and complements his interests perfectly. I must read his earlier novels.
—————
I’d rather make no negative comment, but in his interview with Oprah, McCarthy mentioned his dislike of dialogue punctuation (stating that there was no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks) and at least one reviewer has stated that there is never any problem with attribution in McCarthy’s work.
Well…yes there is. I often have to re-read his dialogue to see who is saying what, and that is what the punctuation is for. ( )

I have finally reached a point in my reading maturity where I understand deeply the appeal of Cormac McCarthy. It has been obvious to me for a long time that he is an aesthetic titan, a truly preternatural genius of imagery, word choice, setting, and tone, but the depth of his main themes (life and death, suffering, violence) are now clear to me in a way they were not before (and I guess my vocabulary is also just bigger now so that it’s easier to read through the stories without the distraction of constantly referencing a dictionary). In light of reading this novel I am retroactively changing my opinions on some of his other work, namely Blood Meridian—considering that I weighed nearly all its value as aesthetic, and none thematic (I also did not have as much fun reading it as I may have rightly allowed myself).

Suttree is the gloomy story of Cornelius Suttree, a man who renounced his well-off past to live the life of a drunken destitute, primarily making his meager living fishing along the Tennessee River running through Knoxville, Tennessee. I really like that description of this book being a “doomed Huckleberry Finn.”

This book was very fun to read. McCarthy is among the greatest poets of English prose writing, probably #1 among Americans. Seriously, try reading this stuff out loud, it’s beautiful: lyrical, full of potent imagery, alliteration, allusion. He is the veritable king of mot juste. I truly do not understand whence this man’s vocabulary has been built; it is astounding. It can be a little bit distracting at times to look up so many words, but that distraction should best be understood as fun, an opportunity to expand one’s own vocabulary, rather than an ongoing frustration. There is so much depth to this language we do not know.

This is not a full fledged review by my standards because I am a few days past finishing the book and didn’t keep good notes while reading, but oh well, all the more reason to reread it later.

I will end with some of my favorite quotes from the novel. They are split about 50/50 between prose pyrotechnics and thematic brilliance.

- Sot’s skull subsiding, sweet nothingness betide me. (p. 79)

- [About photographs of the dead] Blind moil in the earth’s nap cast up in an eyeblink between becoming and done. I am, I am. An artifact of prior races. (p. 129)

- How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A taste 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. (p. 153)

- But there are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse. (p. 372)

- Tilting back in his chair he framed questions for the quaking avoid of lamp light on the ceiling to post to him:
> Supposing there be any soul to listen and you died tonight?
> They’d listen to my death.
> No final word?
> Last words are only words.
> You can tell me, paradigm of your own sinister genesis construed by a flame in a glass bell.
> I’d say I was not unhappy.
> You have nothing.
> It may be the last shall be first.
> Do you believe that?
> No. What do you believe?
> I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu.
> Equally?
> It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul.
> Of what would you repent?
> Nothing.
> Nothing?
> One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all. (p. 414)

- In the toils of orgasm—she said, she said—she’d be whelmed in a warm green sea through which, dulled by the murk of it, pass a series of small suns like the footlights of a revolving stage, an electric carousel wheeling in a green ether. Envy‘s color is the color of her pleasuring, and what is the color of grief? Is it black as they say? And anger always read? The color of that sad shade of ennui called blue is blue but blue unlike the sky or sea, a bitter blue, rue-tinged, discolored at the edges. The color of a blind man’s noon is white, and is his nighttime too? And does he feel it with his skin like a fish? Does he have blues, are they bridal and serene, or yellows, sunlike or urionous, does he remember? Neural colors like the fleeting tones of dreams. The color of this life is water. (p. 415)

- Mr Suttree it is our understanding that at curfew rightly decreed by law and in that hour wherein night draws to its proper close and the new day commences and contrary to conduct befitting a person of your station you betook yourself to various low places within the shire of McAnally and there did squander several ensuing years in the company of thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees.
> I was drunk, cried Suttree. (p. 457)

- Seized in a vision of the archetypal patriarch himself unlocking with enormous keys the gates of Hades. A floodtide of screaming fiends and assassins and thieves and hirsute buggers pours forth into the universe, tipping it slightly on its galactic axes. The stars go rolling down the void like redhot marbles. These simmering sinners with their cloaks smoking carry the Logos itself from the tabernacle and bear it through the streets while the absolute prebarbaric mathematick of the western world howls them down and shrouds their ragged biblical forms in oblivion. (pp. 457-458)

- I know all souls are one and all souls
lonely. (p. 459)

- Some eastern sea that lay heavily in the dawn. There stood on its farther rim a spire of smoke attended and crowned by a plutonic light where the waters have broke open. Erupting hot gouts of lava and great upended slabs of earth and a rain of small stones that hissed for miles in the sea. As we watched there reared out of the smoking brine a city of old bone coughed up from the sea's floor, pale attic bone delicate as shell and half melting, a chalken shambles coralgrown that slewed into shape of temple, column, plinth and cornice, and across the whole a frieze of archer and warrior and marblebreasted maid all listing west and moving slowly their stone limbs. As these figures began to cool and take on life Suttree among the watchers said that this time there are witnesses, for life does not come slowly. It rises in one massive mutation and all is changed utterly and forever. We have witnessed this thing today which prefigures for all time the way in which historic orders proceed. (p. 459) ( )