Well Bottom Blues

I was mumbling last month  about starting up a Bloomsday reading again a few weeks ago but dropped it. And I haven’t cracked my much sticky noted  and underlined disintegrating binding copy this year. Instead I am currently readinf Suttree by Cormac McCarthy, and I’m feeling disposed to call it the American Ulysses.

It’s as perfect a slice of life of the South 70 years ago as any I’ve read.  Cornelius Suttree abandons the life of his relatively well to do family to drop so far out of their life only Charles Bukowski could possibly find him.

It echews the reliably euro-mythological framework for purely picaresque voyage upon and alongside an Acheron that owes as much to Twain as it does to dark chroniclers like Celine and Miller.

This is The Great American Novel. If you had a liberal arts education where you were given Faulkner and O’Conner  and McCullers to read in Southern Literature but not this you were cheated.

If I were king you would not be allowed to graduate high school in the south without reading this and Beloved.