Quick Review

Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


There is a fair trade in academic buncombe these days, seeking to define or redefine, resuscitate or wreck the essay.  It all to do with what is or is not nonfiction, and or literature, and it can all be great and utterly useless fun; a kind of intellectual Hacky Sack that looks something like sport but actually is just juggling.  What makes that whole silly business look so very silly is of course that while all these effete darlings are whiffling the essay back and forth in the Groves, the essay meanwhile is in the midst of a roaring new popularity.  I don't know but suspect that this has largely to do with opportunity for essayists on the Internet.  That, and of course the popularity of the form among a new generation of radio personalities on innovative shows like This American Life and the like.  (There's a ridiculous old saw among American booksellers that "essays don't sell" that is only now being abandoned, thanks to the likes of Sedaris, Vowell, and the late and much lamented David Rackoff, etc.)

In addition to the personal and or comic essayists who've done so well recently, there is also a new generation of very exciting practitioners of the essay as journalism, and none better than John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose newest book proved to be among the happiest discoveries I made this year.  Sullivan writes a straight  reportorial style, but without any of the tough-guy-correspondent's swagger that often makes even the best of the old "New Journalism" --Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, even Didion -- a bit gristly going down. Sullivan is not without irony, but attitudinally he's more hipster than hard-boiled.  He does however have great respect for the form, trusting, for instance, to a Christian Rock hootenanny to explain itself without much in the way of nudges or winking from him.  Like the best of that earlier generation, he clearly relishes the telling without insisting he is more interesting than, say, "The Miz"; an all-American hustler from the low, early ranks of reality "stardom."  There's solidity to these pieces that bespeaks an admirable confidence, not only in the writer but his readers. 

Sullivan however is not outside any of the stuff he writes.  He's right in it after Katrina, most obviously, but he does not obtrude, and he trusts what he sees without suggesting that we can't, shouldn't or that it would be crass to ask if he really got his shoes wet.  (And wonderfully, he did all this presumably without entering into a long and twee conversation with a fact-checker, or if he did, bless 'im, he spared us the mixed blessing of publishing that instead of or as a postmodern quilting around his reporting.)

Much as I really enjoyed every line of his journalism here, my favorite stuff was actually Sullivan writing more straight-forwardly as a cultural critic, secure in both his opinion and taste, but without any obvious theoretical or aesthetic agenda.  There is an essay here that is among the few really honest and respectful things, and perhaps the best thing I've ever read about Michael Jackson.

I will now eagerly look for Sullivan's earlier memoir -- another thriving if so supposedly deeply troubling form, interestingly enough -- and anything else he writes hereafter.

Clearly, one of the good guys.



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