Suttree

Of course such an outline reads like a simplification, recalling Conrad’s remark that, “approached with sufficient detachment,” the entire history of the human race could be expressed in a single phrase, “ey were born, they suffered, they died.”¹ Conrad was able to declare that he was not capable of such detachment and neither is McCarthy, or any novelist. Conrad was objecting to a critical judgment that his novel was “too long.” Suttree is by far the longest of McCarthy’s novels. It comprises some four hundred and seventy-one pages, fifty or so more than his next longest, The Crossing, and two hundred and seventy-four more than Child Of God. It is reputed to have taken him twenty years to write. Never the-less-the above outline is fairly exhaustive. It follows therefore that “the devil is in the detail,” doubly so since the eponymous Suttree, being an educated, reflective and self-aware individual, allows McCarthy the freedom to take us within this protagonist’s consciousness, to provide us with experiences of his emotional life, to give us indications of his motivation, to see his hallucinations, suffer his deliriums and inhabit his dreams. e text is also rich in detail to an extent that goes

well beyond anything in McCarthy’s other works, details of everyday life, of the actions of the many other characters of the text, of Knoxville and its environs, of the Tennessee River, of the surrounding mountains and woods. Suttree therefore is quite different to McCarthy’s other novels in significant ways. At the same time it is informed by characteristic McCarthy themes and preoccupations and remains very clearly related to the works that both precede and follow it.