Suttree is a novel set in Knoxville, Tennessee, in the early 1950s. Cornelius Suttree, born into a respectable family, has left it to live on a houseboat on the Tennessee River among fishermen, drifters, thieves and eccentrics. Through a series of comic, tender and sometimes harsh episodes, the book follows his life with these outcasts and his struggle with grief and his own place in the world. Partly drawn from McCarthy's own experience, it is one of his longest and most humane works, and it is rich in humor and language.
Quotes
How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state 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.
In the long arcade of the bus station footfalls come back like laughter. He marches darkly toward his darkly marching shape in the glass of the depot door. His fetch come up from life's other side like an autoscopic hallucination, Suttree and Antisuttree, hand reaching to the hand.
Put away these frozenjawed primates and their annals of ways beset and ultimate dark. What deity in the realms of dementia, what rabid god decocted out of the smoking lobes of hydrophobia could have devised a keeping place for souls so poor as in this flesh. This mawky wormbent tabernacle.
He reached down and tapped Suttree's knee with his forefinger. You, my good buddy, are a fourteen carat gold plated son of a bitch. That's what your problem is. And that being your problem, there's not a whole lot of people in sympathy with you. Or with your problem.