Suttree has been compared[1] to James Joyce's Ulysses and John Steinbeck's Cannery Row, and called "a doomed Huckleberry Finn"[2] by Jerome Charyn.

Suttree lives alone in a houseboat, on the fringes of society on the Tennessee River, earning money by fishing for the occasional catfish.

He becomes involved with a teenage girl from a destitute family, but awakens in the night to find her crushed to death by a landslide that falls on their homeless encampment.

This occurs after a black friend of Suttree is killed in a fight with the police and Harrogate is arrested in a failed robbery attempt.

"[9] The profile writer and music journalist Stanley Booth observed that Suttree was "probably the funniest and most unbearably sad of McCarthy's books...which seem to me unsurpassed in American literature.