“I learned that there is one Suttree and one Suttree only,” says the hero of Cormac McCarthy’s fourth novel, Suttree. He is referring to himself, but the eponymous novel is also a singularity. As the prologue addresses the reader, “Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town . . . no soul shall walk save you.” As its pages are turned, the novel is also each man’s one and only Suttree.

Set in Knoxville in 1951, the novel opens with a fisherman on the Tennessee river, running his lines and stopping to watch the police haul up the body of a suicide. The fisherman, having pulled his skiff ashore for a better view of the proceedings, is spotted by an acquaintence: “Hey Suttree,” the man calls. We have now been formally introduced to Cornelius Suttree, a man who makes his living on the river, a river which transports as well as inspires, entombs, provides, swallows or baptizes the rudest of surviving forms (some of which finally do not survive). 

Paperback
480 pages
May 5, 1992