SUTTREE

A privileged son of a lawyer decides to live alone in a ratty houseboat in 1950's Knoxville. Desperately poor, he spends his mornings fishing in the polluted Tennesse River, getting blackout drunk at night. Sometimes he goes weeks without speaking to anyone. A gorgeously written threnody to all the world's loners, criminals, degenerates, insane, and broken-hearted. Also funny.

First Sentence:
“Dear friend now in the dusty clockless hours of the town when the streets lie black and steaming in the wake of the watertrucks and now when the drunk and homeless have washed up in the lee of walls in alleys or abandoned lots and cats go forth highshouldered and lean in the grim perimeters about, now in these sootblacked brick or cobbled corridors where lightwire shadows make a gothic harp of cellar doors no soul shall walk save you.”