In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Head in the Clouds
  • Paul Collins (bio)
Pulphead. John Jeremiah Sullivan. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. http://us.macmillan.com/FSG.aspx. 384 pages; paper, $16.00.

Had you bought the collected essays of John Jeremiah Sullivan in 1861—his name lends itself to this notion—you might have picked it up at Boston's Old Corner Bookstore, perhaps after seeing a notice in the Atlantic Monthly or the Southern Literary Messenger. You'd recognize the name and recall he'd written some fine work for them over the past decade, but you wouldn't necessarily have the essays at hand any more. It'd be a welcome addition to your bookshelf—which, it being 1861, you would also still have.

He may have paid a guarantee against the print run; the letters tucked into review copies would have been handwritten by Sullivan himself, or by an editor like James Fields. The volume would earn deserved praise, but probably not a profit. There is a fair chance that the publisher would deliver hundreds of unsold copies to the author, leaving him—as Henry David Thoreau once ruefully joked—"with a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself."

We do not burden writers with such ballast today, but the same basic problem endures: books remain in the room—in somebody's room—long after the buyers have left. And to defy that age-old truism that collections don't sell, publishers attempting a vaguely commercial go of it have even less time to get the books out of their room and into someone else's. There's an unforgiving review and sales cycle of perhaps 90 days, the deadfall-trap of sudden chain returns on credit, and a turnover rate that can easily orphan a work between its acquisition and its completion.

Such volumes might not have sold any better in 1861, but there was one key difference back then: the buyer and seller alike knew why it was being collected between two pieces of sewn and fabric-covered paperboard. Today, when many of the originals linger online, the motive for an essay collection increasingly becomes simple proximity.

And so I pondered this as I read Pulphead: why place them together?

I'll admit that I was of two minds over Pulphead—because it seemed like I was reading two collections. The first one's contents generally ran something like this: a pop culture field-piece, featuring a long open with a slightly hapless narrator; he awkwardly seeks a guide to the event or personage involved, faces the absurdities of accessing said event or figure, makes a sharply observed meditation on a secondary source on the subject, and then leaves you with a melancholy but greater appreciation of Michael Jackson, Axl Rose, Christian music, etc.

"My sporadic descents to the crushing depths of pop-rock culture," he drolly admits, "had quite predictably made me the go-to guy."

And rightly so: Sullivan can reach into pop's depths and heights with equal earnestness, often within the same paragraph. He's a canny observer of Jackson's heartbreakingly crafted musical persona—"Listen to him on The Dating Game in 1972 and you'll hear that his voice is lower at fourteen than it will be at thirty," he points out—and can flourish the devastatingly offhand observation that the aging Axl Rose "looks like he's wearing an Axl Rose mask." Yet even the cruelest moments have a point. When he observes that, like cheap drugstore fragrances, "every successful crappy secular group has its Christian [rock] off-brand," it's to lead the reader beyond the facile mockery of lame music and to ponder the earnest and ambivalent souls who listen to it.

Sullivan might be America's best living writer of the pop-culture field piece. But the inherent challenge of any essay collection is repetition. Pieces laid out on glossy magazine paper months or years apart are each a discrete aesthetic experience of the author's craft. You probably do not have a three-year-old copy of a previous assignment for the magazine next to you as you read his latest dispatch. But...

pdf

Share