Jennifer’s Reviews > Suttree > Status Update

This is McCarthy as lyricist at his best. Whew! It’s easy to lose the plot to the poetic beauty and brutality of his prose. I stop to reread sentences just to keep tasting them. Our own Dylan Thomas. But where Thomas used lyricism to explore the "force that through the green fuse drives the flower," McCarthy’s apocalyptic elegy is viscerally seductive. An alluring death siren, if ever a man were one. Holy shit!

“Old stone walls unplumbed by weathers, lodged in their striae fossil bones, limestone scarabs rucked in the floor of this once inland sea. Thin dark trees through yon iron palings where the dead keep their own small metropolis. Curious marble architecture, stele and obelisk and cross and little rainworn stones where names grow dim with years.”

Why did I ever reach for a biography when his words are so hypnotic?