None
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). 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.
None NonePub Date: Feb. 1, 1978
ISBN: 0679736328
Page Count: 481
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1978
PERSPECTIVES
IN THE NEWS
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.
When the four adult Madigan children come home for Christmas to visit their widowed mother for the last time before the family house is sold, a familiar landscape of tensions is renewed and reordered.
Newly chosen as Ireland’s first fiction laureate, Enright (The Forgotten Waltz, 2012, etc.) showcases the unostentatious skill that underpins her success and popularity in this latest story of place and connection, set in an unnamed community in County Clare. Rosaleen Considine married beneath her when she took the hand of Pat Madigan decades ago. Their four children are now middle-aged, and only one of them, Constance, stayed local, marrying into the McGrath family, which has benefited comfortably from the nation’s financial boom. Returning to the fold are Dan, originally destined for the priesthood, now living in Toronto, gay and “a raging blank of a human being”; Emmet, the international charity worker struggling with attachment; and Hanna, the disappointed actress with a drinking problem. This is prime Enright territory, the fertile soil of home and history, cash and clan; or, in the case of the Madigan reunion, “all the things that were unsayable: failure, money, sex and drink.” Long introductions to the principal characters precede the theatrical format of the reunion, allowing Enright plenty of space to convey her brilliant ear for dialogue, her soft wit, and piercing, poetic sense of life’s larger abstractions. Like Enright's Man Booker Prize–winning The Gathering (2007), this novel traces experience across generations although, despite a brief crisis, this is a less dramatic story, while abidingly generous and humane.
A subtle, mature reflection on the loop of life from a unique writer of deserved international stature.Pub Date: May 4, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24821-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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