On ‘Suttree,’ Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece

Chapter 16, the literary site for Humanities Tennessee, is celebrating 50 great Tennessee books from the past 50 years. They asked me to participate fairly early on, so the great SUTTREE, my favorite book and Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece (says me), was available.

My essay mostly hails the book itself—the setting, the wild cast of characters, those wondrous sentences—but I also get a little feisty with those McCarthy readers and scholars who don’t think CM got to be the shit until he arrived Out West:

Yes, I know Blood Meridian. A great book, beautifully written — and savagely so. But you can have it, for this exercise of identifying McCarthy’s masterwork. You can have that and The Border Trilogy and all the pretty horses they rode in on. You can have The Road and its post-apocalyptic hellscape — early 1950s Knoxville was as scary and more compelling.

Here’s a link to the essay. Enjoy.