Suttree
Cornelius Suttree walks away from a well-off Knoxville family to live on a houseboat among the river's drunks, prostitutes, fishermen, and ragpickers. McCarthy spent some twenty years on this 1979 novel, his most personal and by far his funniest: a comic elegy for a skid row he knew firsthand, thick with baroque Faulknerian sentences and a cast of holy grotesques, Gene Harrogate the melon-defiling country boy chief among them. The plot is mostly weather and disaster; the pleasure is the prose and the company. Cult readers call it his masterpiece.
The opening chapter is “like walking into a fog,” and readers say they stall there before the book properly starts. The prose is “over descriptive, to the point where it completely lost my attention,” with invented compounds and no quotation marks around any of the dialogue. There is almost no plot, only episodes. Suttree gives you nothing to hold onto either, since readers “never know what is motivating Suttree,” which makes it “hard to like the book when you don’t like the main character.” Readers who loved Blood Meridian and The Road report this one alone defeated them, one having “genuinely hated every adjective-filled page.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
