Pulphead (2011) by John Jeremiah Sullivan

Audiobook Review

100 Best Books of the 21st Century (New York Times 2024)

Pulphead (2011)

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

  Pulphead by journalist/essayist John Jeremiah Sullivan placed 81st on the New York Times 100 Best Books of the 21st Century list.  It's a good example of how the lack of guidelines that governed the balloting process (the list was picked by a bunch of folks who were just asked to list their 10 best books published between 2000 and the present without specifying what "best" meant).    The first quality of the list that the aseembly process produced is that there are BOTH books of fiction and non-fiction and within both broad categories there are examples of multiple genres- so for fiction there are short story collections, novels and a couple novellas and then for non-fiction there is biography, memoir and books of essays.  Pulphead is a collection of long-form magazine articles that were published in places like the New Yorker and Esquire.  Sullivan is an obviously capable writer who reflects the teachings of "new journalism" (frequent asides about the relationship with the editors paying for his articles and his own presence as a protagonist) as well as the wave of identify based writing that has been in vogue in recent decades.

   Sullivan is a representative of what you might call the upper South- references to Kentucky and North Carolina as "home" and subjects like the Native American caves of the Appalachians and an article about a huge Church-rock fest that discusses his high school flirtation with Evangelical Christianity.    I enjoyed much of Pulphead- his music writing, in particular grabbed me to the point where I again caught myself wondering how I had never heard of Pulphead before the 100 Best Books list.  At the same time it was interesting that this book of magazine articles placed, at all, on this list.  

 If you look at the ballots section of the project very few of the voters placed more than a couple of books on the final list. Some voters didn't pick any of the final 100- James Patterson and Elin Hilderbrand, for example.  At the other end of the spectrum you have Harvard Lit Professor Anette Gordon-Reed, who placed 7 of her 10 picks and had three of the top 10 books.  Author Daniel Alcaron placed 9/10.  Of course, there is a bias towards recency but there seems to be some people who pick only "serious" books and others who defiantly stuck to what is popular.  Overall the serious people did much better than the popular people which suggests that the group definition of "best" has something to do with a traditional definition of literary merit- a challenging book which makes the reader work for a pay-off.