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A review by tobin_elliott
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Did not finish book. Stopped at 17%.
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.
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.