John Jeremiah Sullivan is hot stuff right now. Still several years shy of 40, he is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, contributing editor at Harper’s, and southern editor of The Paris Review. In a New Yorker piece last December called “Reality Effects,” it was Sullivan’s remarkable essay collection, Pulphead, that James Wood used as a springing-off point to proclaim that the American magazine essay is entering a sort of renaissance. Sullivan may be a new voice, but he’s becoming an important influence on an emerging generation of essayists and critics.
True, it’s hard to ignore the similarities between him and the late David Foster Wallace. Both found success early in their careers. Both have an uncanny knack for the perfect adverb. And both have voices which are whimsical and ironic—but Sullivan is less self-consciously postmodern than Wallace; he sheds some of Wallace’s slightly-too-twee bits (and copious footnotes) and adds a little southern grit.
Though he’s almost always writing in the first person, Sullivan skillfully varies his narrative tacks in Pulphead. In “Upon this Rock,” Sullivan is the main character: he goes on a reporting trip to Creation, the Christian rock festival, where an encounter with the band Petra propels him back to his teens. In a piece at the end of the book, Sullivan recounts the weird experience of living in a house frequently used as a location for a TV show. Other essays include profiles of individuals (“The Last Wailer,” about Bunny Wailer, major influence on Bob Marley) or groups (“Unknown Bards,” about old bluegrass singers); second-person pieces that address the reader and the author (“Michael,” about Michael Jackson); stories that play a little fast and loose with the truth (“Violence of the Lambs”); and esoteric histories (“La•Hwi•Ne•Ski: Career of an Eccentric Naturalist,” about Constantine Rafinesque, gadfly naturalist and explorer). Sullivan’s prose (rapid, conversational, and speckled with profanities) is frequently hilarious: of the Creation assignment, he says, “It is wrong to boast, but in the beginning, my plan was perfect …. I’d stand at the edge of the crowd and take notes on the scene, chat up the occasional audience member (‘What’s harder—homeschooling or regular schooling?’).” But it is also often moving—as here, in the same essay, when he is grappling with his memories of his short-lived teenage conversion:
Why should [Jesus] vex a person? Why is His ghost not friendlier? Why can’t I just be a good child of the Enlightenment and see in His life a sustaining example of what we can be, as a species?
Once you’ve known Him as a god, it’s hard to find comfort in the man. The sheer sensation of life that comes with a total, all-pervading notion of being—the pulse of consequence one projects onto even the humblest things—the pull of that won’t slacken.
And one has doubts about one’s doubts.
This is highly personal prose—almost uncomfortably personal. And yet, the man that emerges from these essays is strangely half-drawn. You might reasonably assume that after 365 pages of mostly first-person prose, the reader would get to know the writer a bit. Yet all we really know at the end is this: he had a flirtation with evangelicalism when he was a teenager; he has a brother, Worth, who was electrocuted by a microphone and lived to tell the tale; he loves MTV’s The Real World and has seen most of the episodes; he was an editor at the Oxford American; the Wilmington, North Carolina house that he and his family live in was a major location for the WB’s One Tree Hill; he apprenticed/lived with a very old Andrew Lytle, the last of the Southern Agrarians; he worships Axl Rose. This is a Facebook profile, not a portrait of a man.
But Pulphead is not a memoir, and Sullivan the shadow-narrator doesn’t come across as elusive or aloof. He gives the feeling of a chummy author-reader relationship without talking about himself all the time: reading him is like having a drink with a particularly skilled conversationalist.
It’s perhaps telling that everyone has a different evaluation of the best and worst essays in Pulphead. James Wood thinks the essay on The Real World is the best and the one on killer animals is the weakest; I’d pick the Creation essay and probably leave behind the Rafinesque one; others find the Michael Jackson piece silly but adore the essay on Bunny Wailer; and the piece on his years living with Andrew Lytle won a Pushcart and a National Magazine Award. Sullivan withholds personal details he deems irrelevant, but his style makes us feel as if we’re right there with him. We can step into his shoes, try the tales on for size, find the ones that mean something to us.
This is what gives Pulphead staying power. Once you’ve made a story your own, it’s hard to forget. In this sense, even when Sullivan’s withholding, it’s a generous act. He’s choosing to forgo telling his story in order to give voices to those who cannot or won’t speak for themselves—like the lost bards of bluegrass, like a forgotten naturalist, like a washed-up reality star, like the five guys from the West Virginia woods whose generosity leaves such a lasting impression on Sullivan that he dedicates the book to one of them. And he does it in a way that helps speed the renewal of the genre he’s chosen as his own—and makes us want to keep reading.
Alissa Wilkinson edits Fieldnotes and teaches writing and humanities at The King’s College in New York City. She is an MFA candidate in creative nonfiction at Seattle Pacific University.
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