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Comment by david_shaw | Hacker News Reader

Unrelated to his typewriter, I'm currently reading Cormac McCarthy's Suttree, and I'm really enjoying it.

I had previously only associated McCarthy with The Road and Blood Meridian, but I'm glad I gave some of his other work a shot.

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I remember a Cormac scholar suggesting "Outer Dark" as a good starting point to his works. Haven't read it myself, though. I finished "Child of God" last year -- definitely worth a read, especially if you're interested in the roots of loneliness. McCarthy's empathy towards complete retards is always compelling to me. Sexual intercourses with dead bodies were nonetheless not that easy to digest, though.

McCarthy's sense for capturing dialects is fascinatingly good, really. I remember somebody saying that to a significant part, the phenomenon of Quentin Tarantino's movies lays in his ability to very deeply understand how people actually speak. I'm not from the US, but I would like to say the same about Cormac McCarthy.

As a person who was held back in math class due to poor performance [0], I would prefer that you not use the word "retard".

[0] Which was later demonstrated to be due to a lack of inspiration from my math teachers, a fact that Mrs. King taught me so well in her pre-algebra class in 9th grade. From then on, I got straight As in math. To this day, nearly forty years later, I still credit Mrs. King for helping me get down the path to whatever success I have had in life.

Thank you for your comment. Unfortunately I cannot edit the reply, but I sincerely apologize for my choice of words. I am not a native English speaker, so I was actually using it as a more rough expression for "outcast". People lost or trapped in themselves, possibly due to unlucky past; because of this, they've become antisocial (thinking of Lester Ballard from McCarthy's "Child of God"). Nothing to do with mental performance.

A really embarrassing error, entirely due to poor command of English language. Once again, I apologize. I wish you all the best, mate.

Understood. I thank you for your response!

I confess that when I was much younger, I used that same word in the same way. It was only after my coming to understand how my usage of that word had hurt other people that I came to where I am today.

So, yours is a pain that I know well, and I trust that we are both better for this exchange.

Thanks!

When Suttree found me it was exactly the right time and it left me forever changed. Not a month goes by I don't think of it nearly a decade later. Definitely my personal favorite of his. Wish I was reading it again for the first time :)

Cormac McCarthy has the dubious distinction in my library of producing the most beautiful English I've ever read in service of such unrelentingly dismal stories that I don't feel that I have the stomach to read them again. I admit this is a me problem, but still.

I've only read The Road and Blood Meridian, though. Does Suttree follow the same pattern?

[edit] Thank you for the answers!

All the Pretty Horses isn’t all that bleak. More of a western Bildungsroman.

Not really. Suttree is not exactly a happy story, but it has beautiful prose descriptions of filth and the Tennessee river, great rendering of vernacular language and culture, and some hilarious laugh out loud segments (the watermelon incident, for instance). It's probably the least dismal of his books, tone-wise.

They're all sort of heavy and with grim parts but I think the two you already read are the most disturbing by far. There are some parts of his other books as intense as those two but they aren't pervasive.

Suttree is semi-autobiographical.

There is less violence and more drinking than his other novels.

It doesn’t really investigate morality in the ways most of his novels do.

It is the last of his early novels set in Appalachia.

I’d recommend reading his Plains trilogy, it starts with all the pretty horses. Fantastic books all the way through.

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