Born in Rhode Island in 1933 but raised and educated in Tennesee, Cormac McCarthy is the author of a dozen previous novels and the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Set in Knoxville, Tenn., in the 1950s, this novel tells the story of a man who has repudiated his well-to-do parents, deserted his wife and is now a river fisherman who consorts with robbers, ragmen and other outcasts. ``McCarthy captures these people's lives and speech with a tough, lyric grace,'' PW commented. (October)
"McCarthy's prose [is] laudable, his characters the most inhabited,
his sense of place the most blood worthy and thoroughly felt of any
living writer." -Esquire
"Suttree contains a humour that is Faulknerian in its gentle
wryness, and a freakish imaginative flair reminiscent of Flannery
O'Connor." -The Times Literary Supplement (London)
"All of McCarthy's books present the reviewer with the same welcome
difficulty. They are so good that one can hardly say how good they
really are. . . . Suttree may be his magnum opus. Its
protagonist, Cornelius Suttree, has forsaken his prominent family
to live in a dilapidated houseboat among the inhabitants of the
demimonde along the banks of the Tennessee River. His associates
are mostly criminals of one sort or another, and Suttree is, to say
the least, estranged from what might be called normal society. But
he is so involved with life (and it with him) that when in the end
he takes his leave, the reader's heart goes with him.
Suttree is probably the funniest and most unbearably sad of
McCarthy's books . . . which seem to me unsurpassed in American
literature." -Stanley Booth
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