'PULP' NONFICTION

“Pulphead: Essays”
By John Jeremiah Sullivan
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $10.88
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To be a writer is to obsess about other writers. Mostly it is to obsess about other, better  writers. “Infinite Jest” is an exceptionally good novel. But David Foster Wallace so haunts the modern literary imagination, not because of “Infinite Jest,” or the unfinished and uneven “The Pale King,” or any of his other books. Wallace is the object of a generation’s adoration on account of his unavoidably evident talent, which so patently surpassed that of his peers that, in a sense, it was immaterial what he did with it. Other writers knew they were not as talented as he — even the ones who wrote better books — and they stayed up nights because of it. Jonathan Franzen wrote “The Corrections” just to feel better about himself after reading “Infinite Jest” in manuscript. Smart writers always know who is smarter, even — especially — when they’d prefer not to.

Which is a longwinded way of saying that John Jeremiah Sullivan, the Kentucky-born, 37-year-old contributor to GQ, the New York Times Magazine, the Paris Review, Harper’s and other publications, is that writer at the moment. The better one. The one making it hard on everyone else.

This is, perhaps, an outsized claim to make based on his work, which this week grows from one book to two: The essay collection “Pulphead,” out Tuesday, follows 2004’s memoir-cum-equine adventure “Blood Horses: Notes of a Sportswriter’s Son.” Sullivan is your standard, workaday journalist by trade, the dude who amuses you over your Sunday morning coffee — remember that time he got high and went to Disney World for the New York Times? — doing most of his writing on deadline for men in suits who expect him to help sell copies of their magazines and newspapers. He is not a novelist, let alone a Great American Novelist, let alone a household name.

But he has made the inputs align. He has followed Wallace, among others, into that productive space between high and low, between wordy brain voice and short, transparent magazine sentence, and he has emerged with better pieces than almost anyone else. “Pulphead” contains essays on Christian rock, Axl Rose, inscrutable American cave art and the now-departed Southern literary lion Andrew Lytle, in whose basement Sullivan once lived. The essays are diffuse, entertaining, wise; still, they’d feel arbitrary and scattered if Sullivan weren’t able to describe the 19th century botanist Constantine Rafinesque and The Miz from “The Real World” using the exact same bemused tone of voice. (It helps that he’s big on the first person pronoun.) Sullivan’s feature writing has been plenty influential already, and will likely become even more so after “Pulphead” comes out.

And this is totally unfair, but if you can get the writer fresh off a plane from Wilmington, N.C., and ply him with several lunchtime beers, you can even get him to admit it. “I’d just be outright lying if I didn’t say I’ve seen a lot of pieces where I can tell that people have been reading my stuff and picking up some things,” he said over a late-afternoon meal near Union Square in New York City last week.

“But my immediate next thought after that is that my thing is already just a micro-variation of a thing that has been going on for so long — not just back through Wallace ... then back through the New Journalism into Terry Southern, then back through him into the people who were writing for Fortune in the ’30s like Archibald MacLeish ... If anyone ever tries to tell you that any of it is new, they just haven’t read enough.”

Sullivan’s nonfiction gets compared to Wallace’s nonfiction a lot, but Sullivan freely cops to a) being a lesser talent (“In my mind he’s just better than I am”) and b) not being particularly interested in the generation of fellow journalists and authors he came up with. “I think as a writer your ideas about your contemporaries are really confused and not that helpful,” he said. “There is too much ego static in being alive in the present moment. You can’t see them very clearly.”

Anyway they are very different sorts of writers. Nothing ever really happens to Wallace the reporter; all the sweat is mental. Sullivan, meanwhile, tends to find his subject out in the world, even when that subject — as in the case of Michael Jackson, or the departed blueswoman Geeshie Wiley — has been dead for some time. He has a knack for reportorial serendipity so unlikely that if he weren’t constantly putting little apologetic clauses into his prose about it (“In a gas station I heard a conversation about religion. I almost hesitate to reproduce it, because it sounds made up”), you wouldn’t necessarily believe him.

In one “Pulphead” essay, “Peyton’s Place,” Sullivan relates his family’s experience of having their North Carolina home used as a set on the network television melodrama “One Tree Hill” — the reality of it versus the “reality” of it. In another, months into researching the life of the aforementioned Rafinesque, Sullivan discovers that the botanist and amateur poet just so happened to have sojourned, in the early 1800s, with Sullivan’s great-great-great-great-great-grandparents Luke and Ann Usher. Ann, apparently, made Rafinesque fat, or even fatter, than he was already. “She’s known to have physically forced plum pudding on people,” Sullivan writes. “Right after that year in Rafinesque’s life, you start seeing the word corpulent in descriptions of him.”

What else to call this but luck? Things happen to Sullivan that wouldn’t happen to other writers. Covering a Christian rock festival in rural Pennsylvania for GQ, Sullivan is arriving onsite when an old orange Datsun comes up next to his RV:

“I watched as the driver rolled down her window, leaned halfway out, and blew a long, clear note on a ram’s horn.

I understand where you might be coming from. Nevertheless that is what she did. I have it on tape. She blew a ram’s horn, quite capably, twice.”

That casual address of the reader is a frequent Sullivan tactic; so is interrupting the narrative to acknowledge that, yes, a writer is behind there, somewhere, including some details and excluding others. “I almost never want the reader to be totally unaware of those seams,” Sullivan said. “But the thing there is that, once you start doing that, you are hiding those seams in another way.”

In other words, the likeable guide who wanders through “Pulphead,” who deals with tea party activists and Bunny Wailer with  equal equanimity and an apparent lack of judgment, is not quite the man I’m sitting across from at lunch. “That guy, that narrator, has a hyper-developed sense of how f***** up everybody is,” Sullivan said. “So he doesn’t immediately get into ranking — he doesn’t get into that. Less than I do as a person and as a human being, anyway, because it’s just a social weakness, insecurity, whatever. But he’s better about remembering that there’s no standard — there’s no polestar of normality. We’re all just lost, you know?”

It’s worth mentioning that GQ, the New York Times, the Paris Review — most of Sullivan’s regular gigs, all with a national focus and audience — are New York-based publications. Writers in their 20s and 30s — the ones who aren’t off in mountain caves, anyway, attempting a sequel to “The Recognitions” — tend to gravitate there, for basic, unromantic professional reasons: The editors are there. So are the cocktail parties.

Sullivan, who came to New York in the late ’90s from a job at the Oxford American (then based in Mississippi, now in Arkansas), and left seven years later for Wilmington, is not quite an oddity for living out of town, but he’s certainly in the minority. It was, he said, a deliberate choice. “Leaving New York, to begin with, for me was in part a recognition of certain weaknesses that I had.” There was too much noise there — praise and criticism and envy and infighting. Too many other writers at the bar with an opinion. “And I find that I have done my best work at times when I was fairly sealed off from all of that,” Sullivan said. So he left.

Now Sullivan enjoys a charmed relationship with his New York editors, who give him a kind of freedom that is rare in their magazines. In his book’s penultimate essay, “Violence of the Lambs,” Sullivan profiles a scientist named Marcus Livengood, who looks like a young George Lucas and who argues, convincingly, that animals are in the midst of rising up and beginning a war with mankind. “I believe that dolphins are capable of hatred,” Livengood tells Sullivan, “and that their hatred of us is essentially bottomless.”

The animal attacks depicted throughout the piece are real, mostly; Livengood, however, is not. “Violence of the Lambs” is a weird parable of modern capitalism, complete with a bunch of elephant-on-rhinoceros rape jokes, masquerading as your typical magazine profile. GQ ran it anyway.

“I couldn’t even tell you what was going on in that piece,” Sullivan said ruefully. He laughed. “And so the fact that they let me do it shows me that they had given me a place of such freedom, you know? Because I felt like I could do that, and hand it in with a straight face. And there are people for whom it’s the best piece in the book.”