LITERATURE: Suttree

Your protagonist must make the reader feel sympathetic they say.  There is no doubt that I feel something for Bud Suttree.  I stood by him all the way, watched him get drunk and saw him safely home.  Went along with his life of leaving so much of his potential untapped because I believed him that he was, if not happy, content with what little he had, even if that contentment or better yet, tolerance, was based on maybe not so accurate assertions to himself that that was all he wanted, all he needed, all he deserved.  Almost with a vengence he would blow any extra money at all on something useless like a suit, or transitory like a steak dinner, or the psychologist of the common man, booze.  Then he met a woman, lived with her, saved the money she earned by whoring, and bought a car.  Not any car, a Jag.  Cream colored convertible with red leather interior and black and burlwood dash.  And the silver cat stretching in a run on its nose.  Life as Suttree knew it was changed.

Now he realizes that he is indeed unhappy, unfulfilled.  He’s had the things he lived without–turned his back on in his youth–and they only serve to make him know himself a little better.  He is lonely.  One early summer day he and his ladyfriend take a ride out to the countryside.  This is when he knows it. 

"Suttree knelt in the sand and skipped a stone.  A curving track of ringshapes.  The far shore lay deeply shadowed.  The siltbars delicately sutured with the tracks of wharfrats.  She had knelt beside him and nibbled at his ear.  Her soft breast against his arm.  Why then this loneliness?"

He wonders if she was ever a child, realizes he knows her body well, isn’t bothered enough by the fact that so do many, many others, in fact, she keeps them both by taking off to the big cities for days or weeks at a time to hustle and brings home the money.  He knows that he doesn’t know her, doesn’t love her, and yet, when he turns to her and finds her crying, doesn’t ask her why.

So maybe I don’t know Suttree very well either, and yet I care about him.  Am I jealous of his woman?  She seems so nice and caring, and I too felt it was what he may have needed.  Or the Jag?  The relationship, needless to say, is going bad.  I’ve stopped at the point where in the middle of the street in front of the bar they have a fight.  She kicks out the windshield of the car, damages the dash.

And for an instant, I hate her.