What I especially like about this book, as someone who mostly respects McCarthy at a distance, is the way his characteristic bleakness melds with and is balanced against a sweet sentimentality and deadpan comic sensibility. So, for instance, there's a lavish description of a group of bats as shrieking demons from hell etc. etc. etc., but it arrives in the middle of a Buster Keaton plotline about one character, Gene Harrogate, killing a bunch of them in order to cash in on a bounty. Or you get some of the brisk, concrete writing that McCarthy uses to describe gun assembly in No Country for Old Men applied to a scene of Suttree getting drunk, a scene conveyed entirely through clinical description of setting and action that's so evocative that I could practically smell the liquor and feel my stomach churning. There's drunk and then there's drunk.

Suttree and, to a lesser extent, Harrogate are the two main characters, but a big pleasure of this book is the large cast, ranging from an itinerant rag-picker, a trio of young, down-and-out African American, prostitutes, diner employees, and other small-town people of the kind you might find doing walk-on parts in Huston's Fat City. Characterization blends into setting too, because McAnally Flats as McCarthy depicts is an entire little ecosystem and economy. Everybody is either lending or being lent a dime and scraping up the barest bones of a living. Everybody is just vibing out and drinking and being poor together. A little utopia of trash.

Another plus: if you're a racist, this book is practically a thesaurus of a thousand-and-one terms to describe black people. Something for everyone!