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.
There is barely a plot: Suttree drinks, drifts, buries friends, sickens, and drinks again, and the book is content to be one damned thing after another for five hundred baroque pages. The sentences pile clause on clause until the prose can read as showing off, and the squalor turns monotonous — everyone here is doomed and you know it by page fifty. Do not start McCarthy here; it rewards a reader who already trusts him.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.