Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
There is a line near the end of this book that will stick with me the rest of my life. It not only describes the entire journey of this masterpiece, but it's a bit a sound bit of advice on how to get through life.

"He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him."

Such is the story of Cornelius "Buddy" Suttree, a man who cuts himself off from his family but discovers that he can't cut himself off from caring for others. The story is told the way life flows - dragging along at times, mundane details threatening to drown us (or, in the case of McCarthy's lush descriptions, immerse us), and then something happens, a flash flood of change, whether you were ready for it or not. The book is episodic, characters dropping suddenly from sight, maybe reappearing later, maybe not. Plot lines build and then dead end with limited resolution, others read like day-in-the-lifes. People are happy and joking in one moment, a few paragraphs later and things turn incredibly dark. Like real life, there's not much foreshadowing or an all knowing narrator to hint at what's to come. There's just a man, making the best of the life he's been given.

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