raindark, countercat, athwart

I've turned 26 pages of Suttree by Cormac McCarthy-- a favorite author of mine. I've read most of his novels with the exception of 2 of his earliest, The Orchard Keeper and Outer Dark.

His books are compelling, spare, intelligent and poorly/brilliantly (un)punctuated. He makes up words, but I don't read it as gratuitous. I usually end up sacrificing a night's sleep with a McCarthy novel. My intention is to take my time with this one.

The book begins with an italicized intro. Here is just one crazy good sentence from it:

Down there in grots of fallen light a cat transpires from stone to stone across the cobbles liquid black and sewn in rapid antipodes over the raindark street to vanish cat and countercat in the rifted works beyond.

The first chapter starts like this:

Peering down into the water where the morning sun fashioned wheels of light, coronets fanwise in which lay trapped each twig, each grain of sediment, long flakes and blades of light in the dusty watersliding away like optic strobes where motes sifted and spun. A hand trails over the gunwale and he lies athwart the skiff, the toe of one sneaker plucking periodic dimples in the river with the boat's slight cradling, drifting down beneath the bridge and slowly past the mud-stained stanchions. Under the high cool arches and dark keeps of the span's undercarriage where pigeons babble and the hollow flap of their wings echoes in stark applause. Glancing up at these cathedraled vaultings with their fossil woodknots and pseudomorphic nailheads in gray concrete, drifting, the bridge's slant shadow leaning the width of the river with that headlong illusion postulate in old cupracers frozen on photoplates, their wheels elliptic with speed. These shadows form over the skiff, accommodate his prone figure and pass on.

Keep in mind that the dialogue that follows is Hemingway-spare.