. Spinning .

The morning has me still thinking about him, and as I go my morning rounds along the web, I find another mention of him, on The Great Lettuce Head–he who started me on the McCarthy’s path.  And a comment on my last post from Mark at Clear Lake Reflections that has me thinking and rethinking the way I read a novel. 

I used to read for entertainment.  To immerse myself within the context of the story and the character.  Then I learned to break it down, to seek out the structure and the meaning.  Maybe it was money wasted on years of study, but in Suttree, while off the top of my head I would say that the river formed the motif, just running on in a constancy that started out the story with a drowned suicide, and throughout the book held everything within it from sustenance in fish and mussels, to moving characters about, to all the excrement and unwanted bits of life that people threw within its waters.  Much like life itself, containing all and continuing, despite what is put into or pulled from it.  But while I might pick this out in rethinking, I did not consider it while reading.

I read now for entertainment, to find my way around a world I would not have known.  I also have learned to read simultaneously for writing.  That’s why I have shared the bits of McCarthy and Dorothy Parker when either the language is a thing of beauty, or a technique is noted that makes me bow my head in admiration.

I don’t think I will ever read a work of fiction to find the underlying social redemptive statement.  I will, in afterthoughts that a good book leaves insistently pulsing in my mind, remember certain points made, go back and reread, discover more.  Eventually, if asked, I can analyze the theme.  But sometimes, in a book such as Suttree, there is so much going on in story, so much to spin one’s head with language and its use, that I needed to immediately share and record the experience. 

More later…

One point was made at the Wesleyan conference that I hadn’t considered:  That the necessary change as a result of the event or series of events is not necessarily one that takes place within the protagonist, but in fact, may happen within the reader.

At the end of McCarthy’s novel, Bud Suttree does undergo a change, though we don’t know where he is headed mentally as he leaves Knoxville.  He doesn’t either, not really.  But he knows that he doesn’t want to spend any more time in the lifestyle he had been living for the three years since he had turned his back on another, comfortably wealthy lifestyle to which he was born.  I don’t know if he would have made this move if the neighborhood hadn’t been leveled while he was facing some serious demons brought to his bedside by typhoid fever, but he is once again in control of himself.  He has been devastated by the deaths of people he cared about, people who struggled every day to get through every day.  He helped where he could.  It took its toll on him, and brought back memories of his childhood that we could only guess at.  Events are hinted at, and we can only guess at the trauma it induced in a child, the despair and revulsion it grew in a man.

I will miss Bud Suttree.  He is a good man.  I wish him luck.

Thirteen pages to go and McCarthy is whipping us up into a Godalmighty climax that should leave us exhausted.

Drugs, good or bad, would be hardpressed to produce worse nightmares than those in Suttree’s head.  Methinks McCarthy had a helluva good time writing this ending, opening the gates to let out the full force of creativity in all its most extreme depravity and want.

Uh-oh.  I am down to the last thirty pages, drawing it out as long as I can, unwilling to let go.  McCarthy is disposing of his characters, one by one.  You knew this is where they’d go, where their lives were headed.

And I fear for Cornelius Suttree.

I’m sorry, but Suttree is just one of those books you just have to share…

Leonard’s just out of the workhouse where he spent some time when they found out about his father.  Yep, the old man surfaced, dragging his chains up with him.  And this is where both the story and the writer get to me.  The story makes me laugh; McCarthy makes me ashamed of my own writing.

Leonard finds Suttree and asks him seriously if they can repossess his father’s grave because his mother’s gotten three payments behind on it.  Now that’s funny.

Anywhere else, written by anyone else, this would be unbelievable.  But I am so used to Suttree’s world, a witch’s brew of odd characters perpetually living hard lives and hitting even worse luck as they go along, that this is totally within the realm of the reality of this story.  McCarthy has innoculated me against incredulity, and yet gives me booster shots of conflicts that can still surprise me.

Your protagonist must make the reader feel sympathetic they say.  There is no doubt that I feel something for Bud Suttree.  I stood by him all the way, watched him get drunk and saw him safely home.  Went along with his life of leaving so much of his potential untapped because I believed him that he was, if not happy, content with what little he had, even if that contentment or better yet, tolerance, was based on maybe not so accurate assertions to himself that that was all he wanted, all he needed, all he deserved.  Almost with a vengence he would blow any extra money at all on something useless like a suit, or transitory like a steak dinner, or the psychologist of the common man, booze.  Then he met a woman, lived with her, saved the money she earned by whoring, and bought a car.  Not any car, a Jag.  Cream colored convertible with red leather interior and black and burlwood dash.  And the silver cat stretching in a run on its nose.  Life as Suttree knew it was changed.

Now he realizes that he is indeed unhappy, unfulfilled.  He’s had the things he lived without–turned his back on in his youth–and they only serve to make him know himself a little better.  He is lonely.  One early summer day he and his ladyfriend take a ride out to the countryside.  This is when he knows it. 

"Suttree knelt in the sand and skipped a stone.  A curving track of ringshapes.  The far shore lay deeply shadowed.  The siltbars delicately sutured with the tracks of wharfrats.  She had knelt beside him and nibbled at his ear.  Her soft breast against his arm.  Why then this loneliness?"

He wonders if she was ever a child, realizes he knows her body well, isn’t bothered enough by the fact that so do many, many others, in fact, she keeps them both by taking off to the big cities for days or weeks at a time to hustle and brings home the money.  He knows that he doesn’t know her, doesn’t love her, and yet, when he turns to her and finds her crying, doesn’t ask her why.

So maybe I don’t know Suttree very well either, and yet I care about him.  Am I jealous of his woman?  She seems so nice and caring, and I too felt it was what he may have needed.  Or the Jag?  The relationship, needless to say, is going bad.  I’ve stopped at the point where in the middle of the street in front of the bar they have a fight.  She kicks out the windshield of the car, damages the dash.

And for an instant, I hate her.