Cormac McCarthy's "Suttree"

Cormac McCarthy slays me. I was sure I hated when a writer used big words, and yet McCarthy, who has me reaching for my big red dictionary every other sentence, impresses the shit out of me with his lexicon. Why is that? Where normally that kind of big ten-dollar word when a five-cent word will do nonsense drives me up the wall? Part of it has to do with a writer's knowledge base of words. There's a big difference between the writer who keeps fondling their thesaurus in a constant effort to impress the reader, rather than the reader who:

a) seems to actually know about 100,000 more English words than I do; and 

b) is passionately engaged in word play, sincerely loving the language and have the nerdiest kind of poetry inducing fun with it.