Wandering Across America As Suttree

After finishing Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree for the first time I immediately read it again. It is a notoriously dense and plotless novel, but I couldn’t get enough. I had just graduated from UC Berkeley with an English degree and wanted to be far, far away from any sort of formal educational establishment. I was tired of college students. I was tired of being a college student. I was tired of theory and analysis and everything existing only on paper and not at all in the real world. I deeply loathed myself and my peers for having nothing to write about other than our college experiences. If we were the next generation of American writers then American readers were fucked. We were useless, inexperienced, totally self-absorbed hacks with no perspective on anything except our own anuses. But now here was this Suttree fellow, a young man living in a vibrant world of beautiful squalor.