The thing to realize about Suttree, which I wish I'd realized earlier, is that this is a "hangout book" in the same sense that Richard Linklater movies are "hangout movies." You don't need to worry so much about the plot—though rest assured that it'll catch up with you, as time and death catch up with all of us (alas!)—and should just take the opportunity to kick back and enjoy some time in McAnally Flats, a totally wrecked Knoxville neighbourhood that McCarthy renders in awesome, grotesque prose (Joyce Carol Oates says it's his version of Ulysses, and that rings true to me: Ulysses gone Southern Gothic).

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!