> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/McCarthy-Suttree/12762
> Le devoir, Guay H., le 19 novembre 1994, Cahier D, p. 8
> Québec français, (1995). Compte rendu de [Nouveautés]. (97), p. 22.
> La Cause Littéraire : https://www.lacauselitteraire.fr/suttree-cormac-mccarthy-par-leon-marc-levy
> CC.RIDER, le 14 mai 2008 (Critiques Libres) : https://www.critiqueslibres.com/i.php/vcrit/16801

Nope, clearly not my cup of tea. I don’t want to haggle on the stylistic mastery of McCarthy. Take the introductory description, at the start, for instance: an overwhelming accumulation of nouns and adjectives, reminding of Clifford Geertz’ “thick description”, if only for the cheap alliteration effects and the ostentatious showing off particular, rarely used vocabulary. And then there’s the very minimalistic story, the taciturn protagonist, the often very clichéd other characters, and the loaden conversations, like a mix of Twain’s Huckleberry Finn and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. No, as said, not for me.

Not rating this, because I simply could not wade through any more of this crap. I made it to 17% in the audiobook, which is about 7% more than I give most books, but you know, it's this genius of McCarthy that I keep hearing about, but not really seeing.

So, here's my take on the first four books he wrote.

1 - He chooses poor, lower class, southern characters.
2 - Those characters say, "Well." a lot.
3 - He loves to show these characters in their most depraved light. Expect pages and pages of this.
4 - He'll also detail everything they do to death. Someone wants a smoke? Expect a page of them fishing the pack out, opening the pack, teasing out a cigarette, placing the cigarette between lips, fishing about for a match, lighting the match, bringing the flame to the cigarette, puffing on the cigarette, shaking the match out, discarding the match, and then smoking the cigarette. Expect effusive descriptions of all of the above, and also a circular, repetitive conversation to be going at the same time that means nothing, leads nowhere, and the smoker and whomever they're talking to will separate without the story moving forward a single inch.

Yes, his prose is pretty. He can absolutely turn a phrase. But what's it all mean? There's no story here, just a series of mostly meaningless anecdotes. By the time I got to Suttree puking, wiping it on the curtains, then falling asleep under a bed, all to virtually poetic phrasing, I was out.

Honestly, I feel like I've gone to one of those expensive, snooty restaurants where the menu is in a virtually foreign language and, after an interminable wait, my meal comes, but it's a large place with a paper-thin sliver of underdone meat, and an artfully carved curl of onion, with some sort of colourful sauce delicately arced over everything to hide the fact that there's basically nothing here. I'd leave feeling hungry and like I've invested far too much in far too little.

The next book in line is Blood Meridian, and I've heard better things about that (translation: this one may actually have a plot), so I'll give that one a shot. But if it's just more of the same, I'm out.

A tale of life on the margins of society and life itself. The vocabulary alone makes it worth a read. ( )

Like Leopold Bloom in Knoxville, the protagnoist Suttree, who seems to have grown up in better circumstances, has episodic adventures and encounters with the common people of Eastern Tennessee. McCarthy alternates his stripped down punctuation-less dialogue and detailed listing of simple actions with rich prose poetry that is often describing offal, vermin, decadence, the inebriated and death. All in all, it’s fascinating, inspired and brilliant. McCarthy seems to either understand his talents unusually well or he is very fortunate that his writing style fits and complements his interests perfectly. I must read his earlier novels.
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I’d rather make no negative comment, but in his interview with Oprah, McCarthy mentioned his dislike of dialogue punctuation (stating that there was no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks) and at least one reviewer has stated that there is never any problem with attribution in McCarthy’s work.
Well…yes there is. I often have to re-read his dialogue to see who is saying what, and that is what the punctuation is for. ( )