A letter I wrote to a friend explaining why I like that book, Suttree.

I have always been able to feel things, sense things about the environment that I am in, and even the environment inside myself, and in others. As long as I can remember I've been able to see things that other people couldn't and know things that other people didn't know. Jordan and I were close enough growing up that she knew that I knew things...it wasn't until we were probably 10 and 11 that we actually said anything about it out loud. Even then we just acknowledged it. Its because of this phenomenon that I always said, even as a child, that when I grew up I wanted to live in the mountains. The mountains seemed to me to be the purest essence of what I knew, what I was made of, what my life was made of. It was part of me, without all the messy. Thats why I loved them. It wasn't till later on in life that I realized where I lived was not just a yard, a house, a song, a road, not just a church or some people or a certain sadness, but that civilization had named it, called it a "city". So I learned I lived in a city named Knoxville. But everywhere I went, I felt and listened, and took on the habit of always discerning for similarities, consistencies, or vast differences. In people, in places, in experiences. And in this city there are themes that run unchanged, that are deeper than my simple experiences and wider than my understanding. I have studied them and felt them, been affected by them and tried to affect them, in my own small way, and I wonder even now if its worth it to mess with things you can never fully understand. The more you know the more you are responsible for. Amen?

When I read Suttree, it was as if someone had taken the spirit of this place and put it into a man, into a life, a book, into a feeling created with long strings of words and sounds and phrases. Exactly that.

People move here expecting it to be a very quiet and dismissive little city, with a small thoughts and even smaller aspirations. They expect to be able to just do as they like, live how they like and go about their business, unbothered. People in the distant suburbs sometimes manage to do just that, I think. They live in a subdivision and occasionally make it in to wal-mart or to Krystal. But the closer you get to downtown, the heart, the more this thing, whatever it is, will touch you. People move here with expectations, but before long, the discerning man will notice a certain stubborn despair that fills this town, dramatic despair that is at essence, unnecessary and extravagant. It loves fun, it loves music, it loves living but is ashamed to admit it. It is hopeful but spouts cynicism, it rejects material wealth as "dead" but embraces death in drinking and dancing and running away from life. It is hypocritical and beautiful, sensitive and good at things. It is smart, but too damn emotional to do anything about that. That is just what I see, as a kind of metaphor for the real thing...it is deeper than that and affects other people differently. My parents, for example, or the riverfront. My Aunt Betty. There is a history too, of poverty and slavery and sharecropping and mountain living, of dance halls and knife fights and segregation and the world's fair and those rich brothers. You see it most clearly in the young, and in the artists, dreamers, writers, and musicians.  It is so much a part of who I am... like it or not. 

But whatever it is, (and it is so hard to really put words to it) a perfect portrait of it can be found in that damn book. Suttree. Thats why I like it. Thats why I love it. 

Don't know if any of that made any sense. But still.

~nats