and there is something of a portrait of the artist as a young man about this book. Coming after three objective novels with no trace of a self-portrait, there is nothing here of the author digesting his adolescence. Instead, it would seem that the author has projected himself into a character he might have been were circumstances otherwise, or that he is being autobiographical in an obliquely symbolic way. His protagonist has too subjective a cast to be an observed character. It is as if the author had asked what part of himself bears the imprint of the world in which he was raised, and answered himself by witnessing what these traits look like exemplified by a gallery of characters ranging from near-idiotic to noble.
Such a connoisseur of the outrageous and the macabre (and of the lyrically beautiful, when he wants to be) can be read for the story alone. One is soon won over, however, to Cormac McCarthy’s radically original way with tone and his sense of the aloneness of people in their individuality. At the heart of Suttree there is a strange scene of transformation and rebirth in which the protagonist wanders in a forest, sees visions, and emerges as a stranger to all that was before familiar. This is a scene no one else could have written.
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