SUTTREE by Cormac McCarthy

Cornelius Suttree is living on a houseboat near Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1951.  He makes a living—if you want to call it that—fishing on the river with trotlines.  Suttree is a friend to everybody he meets and the ultimate good Samaritan, usually to the detriment of his own well-being.  Some of these so-called friends he meets in jail, or more specifically, the workhouse, where he is occasionally confined for passing out in an inebriated state in a public place.  One previously incarcerated friend is Harrogate, a teenager who has been caught defiling watermelons—you can guess what that entails--that don’t belong to him.  Suttree gets dragged into various capers, most of which are illegal, such as poisoning bats, robbing banks, and disposing of dead bodies.  He always protests getting involved in these schemes but eventually finds it easier to go along than to resist.  The cast of ne’er-do-well characters in Suttree’s life is voluminous, and I finally gave up trying to keep them straight.  Suttree’s mysterious past proves that he has not always been someone to rely on, but we get only the briefest glimpse of that.  I suppose you could say that this book is darkly humorous, with the emphasis on “darkly.” It reads like a cross between Tobacco Road and Huckleberry Finn, but, ironically, almost every sentence contains a word that I don’t recognize.  Did I look them all up?  No, or I would still be reading this book.