Pulphead

Starred review from July 25, 2011
The age-old strangeness of American pop culture gets dissected with hilarious and revelatory precision in these scintillating essays. Whiting Awardâwinning critic and journalist Sullivan (Blood Horses) surveys 10,000 years of intriguing, inexplicable, and incorrigible socio-aesthetic phenomena, from the ancient Indian cave paintings of Tennessee (and their hillbilly admirers) to the takeover of his Wilmington, N.C., house by the teen soap opera One Tree Hill. Along the way he visits a Christian rock festival brimming with fellowship and frog-devouring savagery; witnesses the collapse of civilization in a post-Katrina gas line; hangs out in the professional-partying demimonde of MTV's RealWorld; marches with exuberant Tea Partiers; scouts the animal kingdom's gathering war on mankind; and traces the rise of rocker Axl Rose from his origins as a weedy adolescent punk in the small-town void of central Indiana. Sullivan views this landscape with love, horror, and fascination, finding the intricate intellectual substructures underlying the banalities, the graceful in the grotesque, the constellations of meaning that fans discern amid the random twinklings of stars. Sullivan writes an extraordinary prose that's stuffed with off-beat insight gleaned from rapt, appalled observations and suffused with a hang-dog charm. The result is an arresting take on the American imagination.

August 15, 2011

Though many of the articles collected here illuminate the surfaces of popular culture, the best of them go deeper into the heart of America.

Most of these essays are reported pieces, some of them profiles (of musical artists Bunny Wailer and Axl Rose), others long-form feature stories (on a Christian rock festival, reality TV, the Tea Party revolt). Yet New York Times Magazine contributing writer Sullivan (Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son, 2004) is always inherently a part of these stories, conscious of himself as an observer and of his perspective as an interpreter, though never gratuitously or self-indulgently intrusive. As a writer for publications ranging from GQ to the Paris Review (where he is the southern editor), the native Kentuckian now living in North Carolina shows his familiarity with what one piece terms "the tragic spell of the South," whether he's writing about his complicated relationship with a literary mentor or rekindling memories of an evangelical past while bonding with believers at a music festival. Throughout, he recognizes the danger of "a too-easy eloquence," and his appreciation of the "unknowable" Michael Jackson in particular challenges a facile understanding. As is usually the case in such collections, some of the pieces are slighter than others, though none seem journalistically dated. Even "At a Shelter (After Katrina)" comes alive on the page through the vividness of its sensory detail. Sullivan's ambition is evident and suggests that he has a much bigger book in him, whether he's examining "a historical portal [where] you could slip into it and get behind the eyes of the American mind for a minute" or contemplating "the future of the human race" (hint: It involves a war against the animal world, which may have some scientific basis or may be a flight of fantasy).

Mostly impressive work from a writer who frequently causes readers to challenge their own perspectives.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from November 15, 2011

In this luminous collection of pieces from roughly the last decade, Sullivan (Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter's Son) is always writing from place, family, personal history: his trip to a Christian rock festival reminds him of his own conversion to (and later disillusionment from) evangelism; the body of Bill Sparkman, the census worker who staged his own death, was discovered not far from Sullivan's ancestral family cabin; naturalist and "cracked Kentucky genius" Constantine Rafinesque grew fat on Sullivan's "great-&c."-grandmother's cooking. Some essays, e.g., the irreverent and electric "Upon This Rock" and "Violence of the Lambs," veer comic; he reminds one of a more affectionate David Foster Wallace. Yet his more probing, serious pieces--"Unnamed Caves," "Unknown Bards," and most especially "Mr. Lytle," which won both a Pushcart Prize and a National Magazine Award this year--are the book's best. A frequently stunning collection by an exceptional writer, this book will push at the mind and pull in the heart.--M.M.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2011
Sullivan's first book-length title, Blood Horses (2004), which gave a revealing inside view of the American horse-racing industry, was an expansion of a feature article that garnered a National Magazine Award. Since then, Sullivan has become a hot commodity in periodical land, penning substantive pieces for magazines such as Harper's, GQ, and the Paris Review. His latest work collects the best of these from the last decade, showcasing Sullivan's literate, insightful prose and ability to remain eloquent whether he is writing about rock-icon Axl Rose or a shelter for survivors of Hurricane Katrina. Many of his topics have a distinctly southern focus, reflecting his Kentucky upbringing, as when Sullivan recounts his adventures at an Ozarks Christian rock concert or when describing his short-lived literary tutelage under the wing of the late southern writer Andrew Lytle. In every piece, Sullivan turns a probing eye on popular culture, uncovering the odds and ends other writers miss, and he does it with a panache that will keep readers on the lookout for even greater things to come.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)