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| Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 365 pages, $16 2011 NBCCA Non-fiction finalist |
After reading Pulphead, John Jeremiah Sullivan’s most recent & superb collection of essays, it’s easy to see why critics lionize him. NPR reviewer, Dan Kois refers to this collection as “among the liveliest magazine features written by anyone in the past 10 years”. So, it should come as no surprise that he garnered the auspicious guest editor role for The Best American Essays 2014. In the last decade, Sullivan’s work has frequently appeared in GQ, Harper’s, New York Times Magazine, and Oxford American--to name a few. Most of the fourteen essays in Pulphead have appeared in revised versions elsewhere but having them together in one collection feels like an extra special treat.
Read a couple of Sullivan’s essays and you'll see that he's a writer of tactical reversals & coy suspense, of candid admissions and genial first-person presence, of adaptive voices and indefatigable curiosity. As James Wood puts it in The New Yorker, “Sullivan’s prose, bend[s] itself around its subject” rather than molding his subject around his prose. This proclivity helps to bring Sullivan and by extension, his readers, closer to the milieu and material of his work. There’s a laid-back--dare I say “Southern”?--sincerity to Sullivan’s writing that seems natural and yet never saccharine, affable but not effusive, genuine but never quite transparent. Sullivan’s opening essay, “Upon This Rock”--a familiar bible reference laden with schismatic theological implications--sets this precedent with deft execution. What could’ve been a jujune piñata-piece--brainy skeptic visits farcical Christian music festival--becomes a considerate, albeit, at times humorous, reflection on human connection and the nature of belief--more of a roving memoir of Sullivan’s direct engagement with a group of guys who, in spite of everything “were crazy, and they loved God”. Sullivan continues: “And I thought about the unimpeachable dignity of that, which I never was capable of. Knowing it isn’t true doesn’t mean you would be strong enough to believe if it were.” This esteem Sullivan heaps on his transient religious buddies and the slight self-deprecation he administers on himself, works well to disarm readerly suspicion--here is someone we can rely on to be honest and considerate, someone we can let our guard down for. One reviewer refers to it as "a lesson in generosity".
Sullivan renders this taut insider/outsider balance by retaining his candor at a slight remove. In a scathing and yet mannerly summation of Christian music, Sullivan offers an unblinking appraisal:
“Every successful crappy secular group has its Cristian off brand, and that’s proper, because culturally speaking, it’s supposed to serve as a stand-in for, not an alternative to or an improvement on, those very groups. If you think it profoundly sucks, that’s because your priorities are not its priorities; you want to hear something cool and new, it needs to play something proven to please”.
Sullivan, here, manages to point out the execrable standard of Christian music as an outsider while still defending it’s potential utility for those among the fold--“your priorities are not its priorities”. He does the same thing for Christian belief too: “Faith is a logical door which locks behind you. What looks like a line of thought is steadily warping into a circle, one that closes with you inside” and yet he still gives the attendees of the festival a fair shake without debasing them as facile. The closing sentence of "American Grotesque" sums up this attitude perfectly: "I hoped for my cousin to fail, and wished him luck."
In fact, this considerate counterbalancing act plays out in nearly every one of Sullivan’s essays with impressive effect. Essays like “Michael” and “Getting Down to What is Really Real”--about Michael Jackson and Real World TV celebs--are the quintessential low-hanging fruit for lazy journalistic lampooning but Sullivan invests or rather implicates himself as an unabashed fan--which slightly resonates as mendacious, but for ironic or ingratiating affect I can’t be certain and frankly find the dubiety gratifying. Instead, Sullivan plays alchemist--making pulp salient without relying on ham-handed academic jargon or stale rehashed considerations of familiar musings on his subjects--“Getting Down to What is Really Real” could easily be considered a meditation on verisimilitude, double-lensed mimesis, simulacrum, pop-culture liminality, and so on but Sullivan keeps it simple: “the single most interesting thing about reality TV, which is the way it has successfully appropriated reality”; he plays the curious onlooker who’s part insider--tottering between observation and participation much like the theme of his essay.
The title, too, Pulphead seems to play with the same quizzical qualities that underlie Sullivan’s style. The moniker, taken from a rescinded resignation letter Norman Mailer wrote to Esquire in 1960: “Good-by now, rum friends, and best wishes. You got a good mag (like the pulp-heads say)...”. There’s little explanation for this epigraph. It simply stands out stark among the introductory pages like a riddle to be solved. Is Mailer’s tone, and by extension Sullivan’s, sneering, jocular; is it, like I’m inclined to presume, both? And why a resignation letter? Why rescinded? Are these facts merely incidental or calculated for some greater intention? Who are the pulp-heads? How does this reference correlate to the title? In this quote, it would seem that the readers, perhaps indiscriminate in their tastes, make a compliment that Mailer wishes to dispute. Is Sullivan suggesting that this collection of essays resembles pulp-nonfiction--“popular or sensational writing that is generally regarded as being of poor quality”? Is Sullivan the pulphead because of the topics he covers? This type of complex, yet breezy ambiguity demonstrates the very opposite of pulp which make the whole consideration delightfully amusing.
Among the themes that tie these fourteen essays together, music--in various forms--resinates as the most prominent. “Upon This Rock” chronicles the misadventures of Sullivan at a Christian music festival called Creation “a veritable Godstock” on a Pennsylvania farm called Agape. “The Final Comeback of Axel Rose” is self-explanatory enough, “Michael”--a re-think piece on Michael Jackson’s childhood & his rise to fame as a soloist, “Unknown Bards”--covering “major blues wonks” including some scholarship on obscure blues performances, and “The Last Wailer”--a profile of Bunny Wailer, the last living member of Bob Marley’s original band. Even “Feet In Smoke” relates the story of John’s brother’s near-death electrocution while playing in a band called the Moviegoers--a Walker Percy novel. The rest of the pieces could easily qualify as “Americana”--a Tea Party rally, a post-Katrina shelter visit, an incredible profile of an almost-entirely unremembered naturalist named Constantine Rafinesque, a spelunking adventure through “secret” caves filled with ancient indigenous wall-art, and an award-winning memoirist piece on the author’s early mentorship with the famous Andrew Lytle.
If it isn't already evident, this reviewer recommends you buy it, read it, revel in it, re-read it, effusively praise it to others, and if you're feeling especially generous, gift it.
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The New York Times “You Blow My Mind. Hey, Mickey!” by John Jeremiah Sullivan
The New Yorker: “Reality Effects” by James Wood
The New York Times: “Sizing Up Pop Culture’s Geniuses and Freaks” by Dwight Garner
The Guardian: “Pulphead: Dispatches from the Other Side of America” by Edward Docx
The Independent: “Pulphead, by John Jeremiah Sullivan” by Archie Bland
A.V. CLUB: “John Jeremiah Sullivan: Pulphead” by Todd VanDerWerff
NPR Books: “In ‘Pulphead’ Essays, Curiosity is the Common Thread” by Dan Kois
LA Times: “Book Review: ‘Pulphead: Essays’ by JJ Sullivan” by Carolyn Kellogg
The Millions: “Staff Pick: John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead” by Bill Morris
Idiom: “John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead” by Robert Carver
Longform: More Essays by JJ Sullivan
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