Missive #300

Cornelius Buddy Suttree shares the three-fold plight of nearly all Cormac McCarthy heroes: he is an unregenerate loner-outsider, his unwavering isolation is never fully accounted for, and his present life and station are described with a poetic force that at once overwhelms and repels analysis. Suttree has left his well-to-do Knoxville family, has bought an old houseboat, and makes his living off the fiver as a fisherman (it is the early 1950s). I have copied a Customer Review that is quoted below which says almost all that I have to say about this book. Except, I want to add that McCarthy does write very descriptively and uses language that will make most people keep a dictionary very close at hand. We follow him for three years through layerings of experience that have very little effect on his character. Suttree lives among the most submerged folks ever born to crawl and die in fiction, “thieves, derelicts, miscreants, pariahs, poltroons, spalpeens, curmudgeons, clotpolls, murderers, gamblers, bawds, whores, trulls, brigands, topers, tosspots, sots and archsots, lobcocks, smellsmocks, runagates, rakes, and other assorted and felonious debauchees—” as he is told while next to death from typhoid fever. His is a very long story with no plot, only episodes in the workhouse, fishing, spending the time of day with ragpickers, white trash, and bottom-dog blacks, drinking and puking, coming into money through an inheritance (only $300) or through a whore who falls for him but goes out of her mind. Only one other character stands out: young Harrogate, a Snopesian hayseed arrested for intercourse with watermelons— a splendid comic creation. McCarthy’s idiosyncratic vocabulary and chronic verbal excesses will put off a lot of readers, but there is a cumulative power and occasional beauty in the relentless wretchedness that Suttree and his biographer wallow in. — Kirkus Reviews

I don’t want to write this because I’m a fan of McCarthy’s work, and Suttree is technically a good book. The prose is superb, the characters are complex, and the situations that arise are often creative and interesting. So whats the issue? The issue is that the books has basically no plot and Suttree is an utterly unlikable protagonist. The book is literally watching a person waste away their life doing nothing for 500 or so pages.

Suttree spends most of the novel getting drunk, and whining about how awful his life is while being totally aware that it’s his choice. He is deliberately making his life terrible and then bemoans his situation. Self loathing at its finest.

The one shining light in the novel is his friend Harrogate’s numerous misadventures. These are some great distractions that populate an otherwise bleak portrait. In the end, Harrogate’s character never realizes his full potential. Like the rest of the novel, he too just becomes another piece of Suttree’s miserable existence. — Customer Reveiew @ goodreads.com

We had some light rain off and on last Friday night and Saturday night then Sunday morning it was a very light sprinkle when we went out for our walk. By the time we had gone half a mile it had become a hard sprinkle and we were getting wet, not too wet but wet enough by the time we got back to Desperado.

Saturday morning was time to do laundry which I did here at the Park. I don’t know if there is a laundromat in Reserve or not but I know that there are a lot of people that are not staying in the Park come here to do their laundry. I also crawled under Desperado to find out what the series number was on the steps that need to be fixed. I then spent more time than was probably necessary finding replacement parts. I’ve settled on getting a complete upgrade since I’m not certain what the problem might be. This next Friday I’ll talk to the mechanic at the garage and see if he agrees and if he can do the replacement.

A previously censored paper from The Lancet has now undergone peer review and is available online.

The study, titled A Systematic Review of Autopsy Findings in Deaths After COVID-19 Vaccination, analyzed 325 autopsy cases and found that a staggering 73.9% of deaths were either directly due to or significantly contributed to by the COVID-19 vaccination.

The paper’s lead author, Dr. Nicolas Hulscher, faced significant opposition in bringing these findings to light. After initially being downloaded over 100,000 times The Lancet removed the paper within 24 hours, according to Dr. William Makis. — Explosive Study Once Removed by Lancet within 24 Hours, Now Peer-Reviewed and Public: Reveals 74% of Deaths Directly Linked to COVID-19 Shot by Jim Hᴏft