JOHN JEREMIAH

SULLIVAN, PULPHEAD (2011)

The American essay was having a moment at the beginning of the decade,
and Pulphead was smack in the middle. Without any hard data, I can tell you
that this collection of John Jeremiah Sullivan’s magazine features—published
primarily in GQ, but also in The Paris Review, and Harper’s—was the only
full book of essays most of my literary friends had read since Slouching
Towards Bethlehem, and probably one of the only full books of essays they
had even heard of.
Well, we all picked a good one. Every essay in Pulphead is brilliant and
entertaining, and illuminates some small corner of the American
experience—even if it’s just one house, with Sullivan and an aging writer
inside (“Mr. Lytle” is in fact a standout in a collection with no filler; fittingly,
it won a National Magazine Award and a Pushcart Prize). But what are they
about? Oh, Axl Rose, Christian Rock festivals, living around the filming
of One Tree Hill, the Tea Party movement, Michael Jackson, Bunny Wailer,
the influence of animals, and by god, the Miz (of Real World/Road Rules
Challenge fame).
But as Dan Kois has pointed out, what connects these essays, apart from
their general tone and excellence, is “their author’s essential curiosity about
the world, his eye for the perfect detail, and his great good humor in
revealing both his subjects’ and his own foibles.” They are also extremely
well written, drawing much from fictional techniques and sentence craft, their
literary pleasures so acute and remarkable that James Wood began his
review of the collection in The New Yorker with a quiz: “Are the following
sentences the beginnings of essays or of short stories?” (It was not a hard
quiz, considering the context.)