One of the most highly-regarded books last year was John Jeremiah Sullivan’s collection of magazine pieces, Pulphead, but although I was tempted by the praise, I was put off by the title, and by the kinds of things that Sullivan was said to write about. Since I first learned how to tune into the Internet and to eavesdrop on the cool kids’ table, I have wasted a lot of time and money on disappointing books — Marissa Pessi’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics will probably always be the one that comes to mind when I make this complaint, but there’s a bunch of small-press cranky stuff that has lost my interest on the first page — and am now resolved to waste no more. There is no room in my head for Christian rock festivals, no matter how well captured. And now that I am a senior citizen, I have given myself license to act on a life-long conviction, to the effect that nothing very interesting to me takes place between the Appalachian and Sierra Nevada Mountains, and very little west of the Hudson River. (I will always make an exception for Vestal McIntyre.) It was hard to imagine coming away from Pulphead with anything but a sense of emptiness, of time simply lost.

Then along came William Gibson’s collection, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and I saw a way to stand by my snobberies while yielding to desire to read Pulphead, a desire powered by the relentless cascade of admiration that, by now, must have made the life of John Jeremiah Sullivan hardly worth going on with. I would read both books, and keep a record here of my thoughts about how they compared. I have read one novel by William Gibson, Pattern Recognition, and it is unlikely that I ever read another; but I know that Gibson is important thinker, in the “for our time” sense, so it seemed that the two books would have complementary virtues — bare but useful ideas from Gibson, and lush but pointless prose from Sullivan.

So far, which isn’t very, I’d say that I’m right about Gibson. Let’s face it: William Gibson spent an unhappy childhood reading as much science fiction as he could get his hands on, and science fiction is very bad for table manners. Even the elegant Borges tends to be pompous and vain. So it would be surprising if Gibson grew up to write like — like John Jeremiah Sullivan, whose one venture into science fiction appears to have been an adolescent “Jesus phase.” At the same time, Gibson is thoughtful enough to see that television has failed to realise its early promise — especially the promise foreseen by science fiction writers between the wars — and to note that his own diet of TV, arrived at naturally by his organism, is twelve hours per year. “While science fiction is sometimes good at predicting things, it’s seldom goo at predicting what those things might actually do to us.” Spoken like a true man of sense.

I’ve never read anyone quite like John Jeremiah Sullivan. His writing has the impact of David Foster Wallace’s, but it’s actually stronger because less histrionic. In that opening essay about the Christian-rock festival that everybody writes about, Sullivan deals with the sudden death of an older man in the food court in three moderately-long but walloping paragraphs, in the last of which he wraps things up by having “a colossal go-to-pieces.” The passage works as much on the strength of its dexterity — did that really happen? — as on that of its pathos.

“Upon This Rock” is almost extravagantly not about a Christian-rock festival. The music is dispatched with a compassion that would be condescension if it were any cooler. Sullivan sticks with the gaggle of guys from West Virginia who help him situate his ungainly RV, rented at the last minute by his editor, and what he has to say about them is what most critics have written about, and what kept me away. Even after reading about Darius and Ritter, I couldn’t say that, in spite of everything, I found them interesting. I did not. I found them sad. They’re living lives in which they will flourish only to the extent that they turn away from local society, as indeed they do on their extended hunting and camping trips. One of them has contrived to die since Sullivan met him. (That’s what dedication pages are good for.) And yet, Sullivan’s time with them prompted an observation of the first importance.

I suspect that on some level — the conscious one, say — I didn’t want to be noticing what I noticed as we went. But I’ve been to a lot of huge public events in this country, during the past five years, writing about sports or whatever, and one thing they all had in common was this weird implicit enmity that American males, in particular, seem to carry about with them much of the time. Call it a laughable generalization, fine, but if you spend enough late afternoons in stadium concourses, you feel it, something darker than machismo. Something a little wounded, and a little sneering, and just plain ready for bad things to happen. It wasn’t here. It was just not. I looked for it, and I couldn’t find it. In the three days I spent at Creation, I saw not one fight, heard not one word spoken in anger, felt at no time even mildly harassed, and in fact met many people who were exceptionally kind. Yes, they were all of the same race, all believed the same stuff, and weren’t drinking, but there were also one hundred thousand of them.

It’s enough to make me ask if I’ve got it right when I argue that society no longer needs the external authority of a divinity in order to behave itself. 

As for the book’s second essay, “Feet in Smoke,” I can only scold the critics for not making more of it. It’s a model essay, for one thing, about a highly dramatic event. But beyond all the excitement (which we get in parallel strands, since the event under discussion was covered by an early reality show hosted by William Shatner) there is the diagnostic novelty, as it were, of the exhilaratingly crazy ideas that residual voltage sparks even as it dissipates in the mind of an electrocution survivor — who happens to be the essayist’s older brother. Ardent young writers are encouraged to copy this essay out by hand.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 19th, 2012 at 9:04 am.