Reading Order
Suttree Reading Order
Suttree (1979) by Cormac McCarthy is his most personal, most lyrical, and arguably most Faulknerian novel — a book he spent 20 years writing, set in the Knoxville, Tennessee waterfront district he knew as a young man in the 1950s, and centered on Cornelius Suttree, a man from a respectable family who has rejected his class and his family to live in a houseboat on the Tennessee River among the city's poor, drunken, funny, violent, and tenderly drawn inhabitants. Suttree is the novel that shows McCarthy's range beyond the violence and nihilism his work is most famous for: it is comic, warm, linguistically extravagant, and full of love for its community of outcasts. Suttree himself is McCarthy's most fully realized protagonist — a man in voluntary exile from a world he can no longer accept, choosing to live at the margins not because he has failed but because the center has nothing to offer him. The novel's set pieces (a week-long drunk with Gene Harrogate, a fishing trip that goes surreal, a brothel sequence, a series of encounters with Knoxville's black residents that are among the most racially conscious passages in McCarthy's work) are the fullest expression of McCarthy's prose style in its most expansive, Whitmanesque mode.
Where to start
Suttree — any Vintage International paperback. The least linear of McCarthy's novels and the most demanding in its prose; readers new to McCarthy should probably start with All the Pretty Horses or No Country for Old Men first. But for readers who love Faulkner and want to see McCarthy at his most lyrical, Suttree is the book.
Complete Suttree Book List
- 1Buy
Suttree
Cormac McCarthy·1979·The novel — Cornelius Suttree on the Knoxville waterfront among the city's poor and outcasts; McCarthy's most personal and most lyrical novel, 20 years in the writing; the fullest expression of his Faulknerian prose style. - 2Buy
Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy·1985·McCarthy's most extreme major novel — published six years after Suttree, the violent opposite of Suttree's lyrical warmth; comparing the two novels reveals the full range of McCarthy's prose style and concerns. - 3Buy
No Country for Old Men
Cormac McCarthy·2005·McCarthy's most formally accessible novel — the companion in his broader work; readers who come to McCarthy through Suttree's lyrical mode will want the formally different but equally serious No Country for the philosophical companion. - 4Buy
All the Pretty Horses
Cormac McCarthy·1992·McCarthy's most romantic novel — the National Book Award winner; the accessible companion in his major work; both Suttree and All the Pretty Horses feature protagonists in voluntary exile from the conventional life available to them. - 5Buy
As I Lay Dying
William Faulkner·1930·Faulkner's darkly comic masterpiece — the formal predecessor in Southern American fiction; McCarthy's Suttree prose style, with its long sentences, biblical cadences, and linguistic exuberance, is in direct dialogue with Faulkner's. - 6Buy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Mark Twain·1884·Twain's great river novel — the thematic predecessor; Suttree on the Tennessee River is the 20th-century version of Huck Finn on the Mississippi, both novels about a man who opts out of respectable society for life on the margins of a river. - 7Buy
Henderson the Rain King
Saul Bellow·1959·Bellow's great picaresque — the companion in 20th-century American fiction about a man of advantages who rejects them for something rawer and more honest; Henderson's Africa is the exotic version of Suttree's Knoxville waterfront. - 8Buy
Outer Dark
Cormac McCarthy·1968·McCarthy's second novel — his earliest Southern Gothic work; published eleven years before Suttree, the companion in his Tennessee/Appalachian mode and the earliest expression of the prose style that Suttree brings to its fullest Southern development.
Suttree — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Suttree about?
Suttree follows Cornelius Suttree, a man from a respectable Knoxville family who has rejected his class (his father is a lawyer, he was educated) and chosen to live in a houseboat on the Tennessee River in the early 1950s, among the waterfront's poor inhabitants — fishermen, drunks, prostitutes, a wildly inventive young man named Gene Harrogate (who becomes one of McCarthy's greatest comic characters), and a community of black residents whom Suttree knows and respects. The novel has no plot in the conventional sense: it is a portrait of a life at the margins, a series of episodes and encounters, lyrical passages about the river and the seasons, and an extended meditation on what it means to choose to live outside the structures of respectable society.
Who is Gene Harrogate and why is he important?
Gene Harrogate is a young man whom Suttree meets in prison — he was jailed for 'crimes against nature' with a melon in a farmer's field. He is endlessly inventive, completely amoral about property (he is always devising schemes to steal money), and absolutely hilarious. Harrogate's schemes — catching bats in a cave to sell to pharmaceutical companies, drilling into a vault from below the city, trying to sell live moles — are the comic spine of Suttree's episodic structure. But Harrogate is not just comic relief: he represents a kind of pure creativity and energy in the service of survival, a different response to the same social marginalization that Suttree represents through resignation. McCarthy's affection for Harrogate is evident, and Harrogate's scenes are the most purely enjoyable passages in McCarthy's work.
Why is Suttree considered McCarthy's most personal novel?
McCarthy has never discussed his personal life extensively, but Suttree is clearly autobiographical in its setting and spirit: McCarthy grew up in Knoxville, knew the waterfront, and — by his own testimony — spent 20 years writing the novel. The Knoxville waterfront of the 1950s is described with the specificity of lived experience, and Suttree's choice to reject his family's expectations for life at the margins has the quality of a personal reckoning. McCarthy has also suggested in rare interviews that Suttree is in some sense his farewell to his Southern/Appalachian mode before he turned to the desert Southwest of the Border Trilogy. The novel ends with Suttree leaving Knoxville, suggesting something final about the choice.
How does Suttree compare to McCarthy's other major novels?
Suttree is the outlier in McCarthy's major work. It is longer than most of his novels (over 500 pages), less plotted, and far more comic — Gene Harrogate's schemes are genuinely funny in a way that nothing in Blood Meridian or No Country for Old Men is. It is also the most linguistically extravagant of his novels: where Blood Meridian's prose is extreme in its density and biblical register, Suttree is extreme in its range — it can move from a luminous description of the river at dawn to a comic setpiece in a page. For readers who know McCarthy only through Blood Meridian or No Country, Suttree is a revelation about the range of his vision; for readers who come to him through Suttree, Blood Meridian is a shock about how dark he can go.
What should I read after Suttree?
After Suttree, Blood Meridian is the essential companion — McCarthy's most extreme and most celebrated novel, published six years later, showing the other end of his range. All the Pretty Horses is the most accessible companion in his major novels. For the Faulknerian tradition Suttree belongs to, William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury are the most important predecessors. For the river-life tradition, Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the thematic ancestor.
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