SOURCE: "Tribal Views," in New Statesman, Vol. 99, No. 2563, May 2, 1980, p. 682.

In the following excerpt, Crace discusses categorizing Suttree as a "tribal" work, and faults the novel for lacking an "overall social and allegorical context."

Cormac McCarthy's Big New Southern novel, Suttree, is also a fairly 'tribal' work if one can swallow the quaint dictionary definition of a tribe as 'a group of people in a primitive or barbarous stage of development'. His characters are city derelicts, rag pickers, possum hunters, and various junkyard angels who pass their days in bars (drinking Redtop beer and splo whisky) or in the work-house penitentiary (sipping moonshine). They break strangers' noses as frequently and with as little decorum as they break wind. Suttree, the keystone character of the novel, for all his college education and bouts of aristocratic Southern introspection, is no violet, either, when it comes to busting heads and cracking...