SuttreeFrom the bestselling author of The Passenger and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Road, here is the story of Cornelius Suttree, who has forsaken a life of privilege with his prominent family to live in a dilapidated houseboat on the Tennessee River near Knoxville. Remaining on the margins of the outcast community there—a brilliantly imagined collection of eccentrics, criminals, and squatters—he rises above the physical and human squalor with detachment, humor, and dignity. Look for Cormac McCarthy's latest bestselling novels, The Passenger and Stella Maris. |
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Page 11
... squatted . The old man watched the thin flames . Slow traffic passed above them in a muted rumble . In the fire potatoes blistered and split their charred jackets with low hissing sounds like small organisms expiring on the coals . The ...
... squatted . The old man watched the thin flames . Slow traffic passed above them in a muted rumble . In the fire potatoes blistered and split their charred jackets with low hissing sounds like small organisms expiring on the coals . The ...
Page 12
Cormac McCarthy. The shadowed earth in which he squatted bore the stale odor of a crypt . You didnt see that man jump , did you ? Suttree said . He shook his head . An old ragpicker , his thin chops wobbling . I seen em draggin , he said ...
Cormac McCarthy. The shadowed earth in which he squatted bore the stale odor of a crypt . You didnt see that man jump , did you ? Suttree said . He shook his head . An old ragpicker , his thin chops wobbling . I seen em draggin , he said ...
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Contents
Section 16 | 275 |
Section 17 | 278 |
Section 18 | 282 |
Section 19 | 356 |
Section 20 | 357 |
Section 21 | 363 |
Section 22 | 364 |
Section 23 | 374 |
Section 9 | 205 |
Section 10 | 214 |
Section 11 | 217 |
Section 12 | 219 |
Section 13 | 234 |
Section 14 | 259 |
Section 15 | 262 |
Section 24 | 427 |
Section 25 | 440 |
Section 26 | 469 |
Section 27 | 470 |
Section 28 | 473 |
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Common terms and phrases
aint beer beneath bitch blanket blue boat bones bottle Buddy caint Callahan called catfish climbed coffee cold CORMAC MCCARTHY crazy crossed dark dead didnt dont know door drink dripping drunk elbow eyes face feet fell fire fish floor fuck girl glass goatman goddamned goin gray grinned hair hand Harrogate hell hot eyes houseboat hung J-Bone Jimmy Smith junkman Knoxville leaned light mouth mussels nigger night nodded nothin oars Oceanfrog Okay opened pale passed past pocket pulled ragman rain rear reckon Reese river rock rose shantyboat shapes Shit shoes shook his head shoulder shut skiff smell smoke somethin squatted stone stood street Suttree looked Suttree sat Suttree turned Suttree's swung thin thing tilted took trees trotlines truck walked wall wasnt watched What's whiskey window wouldnt Yeah
Popular passages
Page 5 - A curtain is rising on the western world. A fine rain of soot, dead beetles, anonymous small bones. The audience sits webbed in dust. Within the gutted sockets of the interlocutor's skull a spider sleeps and the jointed ruins of the hanged fool dangle from the flies, bone pendulum in motley.
Page 4 - ... old teutonic forebears with eyes incandesced by the visionary light of a massive rapacity, wave on wave of the violent and the insane, their brains stoked with spoorless analogues of all that was, lean aryans with their abrogate Semitic chapbook reenacting the dramas and parables therein and mindless and pale with a longing that nothing save dark's total restitution could appease.
Page 5 - The night is quiet. Like a camp before battle. The city beset by a thing unknown and will it come from forest or sea? The murengers have walled the pale, the gates are shut, but lo the thing's inside and can you guess his shape? Where he's kept or what's the counter of his face? Is he a weaver, bloody shuttle shot through a timewarp, a carder of souls from the world's nap? Or a hunter with hounds or do bone horses draw his deadcart through the streets and does he call his trade to each?
Page 283 - In an old grandfather time a ballad transpired here, some love gone wrong and a sabletressed girl drowned in an icegreen pool where she was found with her hair spread like ink on the cold and cobbled river floor. Ebbing in her bindings, languorous as a sea dream. Looking up with eyes made huge by the water at the bellies of trout and the well of the rimpled world beyond. (283, emphases added) In this perspective 'perishable...
Page 7 - With his jaw cradled in the crook of his arm he watched idly surface phenomena, gouts of sewage faintly working, gray clots of nameless waste and yellow condoms roiling slowly out of the murk like some giant form of fluke or tapeworm. The watcher's face rode beside the boat, a sepia visage yawing in the scum, eyes veering and watery grimace. A welt curled sluggishly on the river's surface as if something unseen had stirred in the deeps and small bubbles of gas erupted in oily spectra (7).
Page 4 - Old tins and jars and ruined household artifacts that rear from the fecal mire of the flats like landmarks in the trackless vales of dementia praecox. A world beyond all fantasy, malevolent and tactile and dissociate, the blown lightbulbs like shorn polyps semitranslucent and skullcolored bobbing blindly down...
Page 14 - In a dream I walked with my grandfather by a dark lake and the old man's talk was filled with incertitude. I saw how all things false fall from the dead. We spoke easily and I was humbly honored to walk with him deep in that world where he was a man like all men
Page 464 - ... furnaces squat beneath their hydra works of rusted ducting and ashy fields shorn up and leveled and the dead turned out of their graves. He watched the bland workman in the pilothouse of the crane shifting levers. The long tethered wreckingball swung through the side of a wall and small boys applauded. Brickwork of dried bloodcakes in flemish bond crumbling in a cloud of dust and mortar. Walls grim with scurf, a nameless crud. Pale spongoid growths that kept in clusters along the damper reaches...
Page 150 - ... eyes. Remorse lodged in his gorge like a great salt cinder. What will she say? What will her mother say? Her father. Suttree got up and swung down toward the door but the bus had already started. He hung by one hand swaying. All night he'd tried to see the child's face in his mind but he could not. All he could remember was the tiny hand in his as they went to the carnival fair and a fleeting image of elf's eyes wonderstruck at the wide world in its wheeling.
Page 4 - We are come to a world within the world. In these alien reaches, these maugre sinks and interstitial wastes that the righteous see from carriage and car another life dreams. Illshapen or black or deranged, fugitive of all order, strangers in everyland (4). McCarthy's overt condemnation of the "righteous" seems clearly to mark his project as the restoration of "illshapen, black, and deranged