McCarthy, The Tennessee Novels

• The Orchard Keeper (1965)
• Outer Darkness (1968)
• Child of God (1973)
• Suttree (1979)

Four novels by Cormac McCarthy

Having now read all of Cormac McCarthy’s novels, I accept your dare to synthesize the themes of the first half of McCarthy’s writing career – the four Tennessee books. These novels were published over a 14-year period, beginning in 1965 with The Orchard Keeper, and then Outer Darkness in 1968, Child of God in 1973, and culminating with Suttree in 1979.

These early novels differ in location from the rest of McCarthy’s novels which are set in the American southwest and Mexico. The difference matters, because McCarthy’s books are driven by place and time and circumstance, rather than by will of the characters.

While the Tennessee novels are unique and distinct from each other in subject and style, together they differ significantly in scope from the western novels. The Tennessee novels generally focus on a small number of backwoods characters living fairly narrow lives constrained in very limited geographic areas. They are rural and extremely poor, without transportation, and do not have any opportunity (or inclination) to travel beyond a few dozen miles of their place of upbringing. The western novels are sweeping in scope, with many characters who seek change by travel – wanderings, really — through vast regions of the southwestern US and Mexico. (See my reviews of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the three novels of The Border Trilogy)

I should explain the statement that the characters of the Tennessee novels live fairly narrow lives. Their lives are complex and full and spin in and out of control with dynamic change, but their range of experience is shaped by extremely limited opportunities for jobs, education, or participation in the wider American culture. Change is instead generated in confined space with feral instincts, extreme personal violence, crimes of opportunity and greed, and the absence of family and home.

The remarkable feat McCarthy pulls off in the Tennessee novels is his ability to withhold judgment of his characters, while sparing nothing in describing their shuddering and dismal mountain rural lives.  Life in the mountains and gullies and rivers – and the city of Knoxville, in the case of Suttree – is filthy and brutal, with dishonesty round every bend and an economic environment that is dirt poor and getting worse every year.  There is a de-evolution of infrastructure and family, resulting in a brutal code of self-sufficiency and survival. 

This soup of ignorance and filth is the catalyst for change for the characters, and much of the change is for the worse as survival options narrow. In Child of God, we follow the main character of Ballard, who raises himself in isolation into a physically small and bent man whose quirky way and foul mouth repels his neighbors in a nameless poor hamlet. He evolves to opportunistic murder and necrophilia in his isolation. McCarthy presents the facts as they exist, for better or worse, without judgment. We are made to understand.

McCarthy handles the characters in all his novels by describing what they do, rather than what they are or what they think. In Outer Darkness, incest between brother and sister results in pregnancy. In The Orchard Keeper, every person, except an old man of perhaps a more honest generation, is on the take and would as soon steal their neighbor’s last nickel as not. In Suttree, our main character abandons his wife and child to live a life of destitution and self-reliance.

These characters are male and are unable to sustain any form of lasting relationship with wives and women.  There is male wistfulness when wives escape, and lonely dissolution appears inevitable as the men descend further into poverty.

There are few black characters in the first three rural novels, but in Knoxville the white men casually use the n-word.  Suttree himself does not do so and appears to be one of the few white men with friendships among the black men and women.  The best one can say is that McCarthy has accurately captured the speech and attitude of the time and place – and it speaks volumes about these white men.

McCarthy doubles-down on the common characterization of the mountainous southeastern rural way of life as backwoods, dirty and ignorant. It is a crucible that grinds up its people and the environment. Some have said that there is a similarity between McCarthy and Faulkner. One similarity between the two is the ferality of character and racial interaction formed by the narrow geographic worlds created in Yoknapatawpha County and the Tennessee books. Generations are captive to a narrow slice of geography. This similarity between the two authors ends in McCarthy’s later novels that spin out over the vast geography of the southwest.

Each Tennessee novel is an experiment in form and realism. The Orchard Keeper, his first novel, is the most like Faulkner. It is difficult to get a bearing, with shifting narratives and sequences. It has memorable characters, including a scoundrel thief who steals spare change from his wife, and who weasels himself into the pockets of any and all until one day he meets his match when he tries to ambush a stronger man. It has interesting subplots of running moonshine during Prohibition. It paints a way of life in the dirt-poor boondocks, in which folks are unreliable, violent, dishonest, if not resourceful and resilient.

Outer Dark is my favorite of the Tennessee books.  It is actually not clear whether it is in Tennessee, for while the characters and scenes are described in McCarthy’s traditional description of dirt-poor rural folk, the roads and mountains have a dream-like quality and there are references to swamps with alligators.  It begins with a incestuous birth, born of brother and sister.  We encounter mysterious figures of retribution, all violent, ultimately forming an allegorical tale, with magical undertones of fate and comeuppance.  It is driven by a father and mother’s search for a child, and it is excruciating to see them blindly walk into webs of deceit and violence.  I am quite sure the “outer dark” is a biblical tale, and the allegories are surely fantastical tales for the religious among us to appreciate, but I could only feel the presence of a story with magical roots that I did not fully understand.

Child of God is the most straight-forward of the novels.  It is short and moves sequentially to capture the fall of man with a character who is born into nothing, who acquires nothing, and who values only his rifle.  He deteriorates into a hermit-like foul-mouthed existence, shunned by all, until he finds his one opportunity for sex with a dead girl.  He knows of nothing else within his reach, and wallows down a hole of women’s undergarments, murder and obsession.

All the Tennessee books are told in the third person, but in each a mysterious first person speaker briefly appears.  In Child of God, I could identify that narrator as a deputy sheriff, but in other books the role and purpose of the first person is unknown to me.  Might it be some god, or perhaps the reader, providing perspective?

Suttree is a very difficult book.  Apparently, McCarthy worked on it for many years, and the language suggests intense editing.  As with the western novels, it is chock-full of metaphors and vivid descriptions, but much of the vocabulary was beyond me.  There were probably at least five words per page I did not know.  When I took to my dictionary, the selected word was perfect, but it was a chore.  The sentences are dense, and I often thought it could serve as top-drawer poetry if the prose was broken into lines. 

This novel also contains many set pieces that McCarthy must have surely accumulated over a lifetime, in anticipation of incorporating them into a novel.  One could create short stories of scenes in which Suttree, the protagonist, binges into a drunk so overwhelming that the world wheels before his eyes in a 3-day hallucination, or a scene of a bottom-rung whorehouse in which a cynical prostitute contemptuously hikes her skirt to show a tattoo of a rabbit running down the rabbit-hole, or a scene in which Suttree describes the profession of brailing for freshwater mussels, or of a months-long quest for solitude in the mountains near Gatlinburg.  Among others.

Suttree is the only Tennessee book located in an identifiable time and place.  Knoxville.  One can even look up the streets and buildings referenced in the book.  McCarthy is so popular, indeed, that there are websites that show the streets and buildings in Suttree.

This was the start of a trend for McCarthy, for the western novels (other than The Road) occur in specifically identified times and places, some with figures from southwestern and Mexican history.

As dark as the other Tennessee novels are regarding rural disintegration and violence, Suttree is over the top, even for McCarthy, for its unrelenting description of the absolutely disgusting deterioration of infrastructure and nature.  School buildings deteriorate into rat holes, abandoned rusty tools and factories litter the landscape, pus and puke accumulate in beds and clothes, violence is a game, and kindness is notable for its rarity.  It is an unremitting description, in intense prose, of a society gone to seed.

For readers who want to know where to begin:  I recommend starting with Outer Dark, as a place of evil and violence, but with enough magic to wonder what is real and what is imagination.  Child of God is a straight-forward, short novel of the deterioration of a man who starts with nothing and ends with less than nothing.  The Orchard Keeper is a successful experiment, as a debut novel no less, with shifting narratives and out-of-sequence disordered scenes which paint a finely described picture of mountain Tennessee life.  The rural dialogue is hilarious with the wry wit of our education-less characters.  And finally, Suttree is a difficult masterpiece of unrelenting grime and ugliness, presented in dense precise prose, which chronicles a narrator who abandons a life of advantage to make a go of it as a man with nothing but his own identity.