



FEW essayists write with perfect rhythm. The format makes qualities such as clarity and precision more to the purpose; if the prose is a little clunky—well, a reader has only to get through a few thousand words. But open John Jeremiah Sullivan's " Pulphead " and you will discover 14 essays that go down as smoothly as the best fiction. The ideal way to consume these gems is perhaps to have a loved one read them aloud for you. But reading them yourself is a fine substitute."Pulphead" collects the best of Mr Sullivan's pieces for the New York Times Magazine, GQ and Harper's in one volume (a publishing gambit available to few craftsmen). Topics include the Tea Party, Bunny Wailer, reality television, cave sites east of the Mississippi and Axl Rose. Yet Sullivan's powers as a writer are formidable enough to make any topic interesting, even something like natural land formation: "A mountain," he writes in an aside, "is when you smash two tectonic plates together and the leading edges rise up into the sky like sumo wrestlers lifting up from the mat." Close your eyes for a moment and draw the image to mind. It's as useful an illustration as it is a pleasurable sentence. Mr Sullivan is disciplined as well as imaginative, and his pieces are free of writerly fillips. Every sentence has a point.An intelligent and enthusiastic guide, Sullivan is like a charismatic professor, yarn-spinning uncle and intrepid reporter rolled into one. He spoke to us about reading, writing and living in the American South.Reporting is a way to stir up material to take into the chamber with you and turn into smoke. This sounds corny, but it's good for me—spiritually—because it gets me out of the house and forces me to interact with Americans. When you actually get out there and talk to people and find out what they're doing, it's less depressing than you think it's going to be when you're experiencing the country mostly through TV. Reporting provides reminders that things are always more complicated than you think.I like the fact that I don't know who that reader is.At GQ, there was never a temptation to pander or preach to the choir because I had no concept of who the reader was or what that reader might want. Because GQ's readership is all over the place—big gay readership, big African-American readership—I wasn't even able to ask those questions. Which left only one thing to do: to write, and listen to the inner voice a little more closely.When I get on an airplane to take a trip, I'll look around and see a hundred people reading magazines. A handful of them may be reading magazines that I work for. Those readers become a kind of chorus in my head when I'm working on a piece—I have no way of anticipating their reactions, but I like thinking of them as an anonymous gallery.It also motivates me to try more Trojan horse strategies in my pieces, in the sense of structuring them so that you draw as many people in up front as you can. Then, once you have them, you can start turning up the weirdness dial. Not in a manipulative way or an unfair way. I always felt like I had a contract with those people on the plane: they would read me if I could get them interested.The things I read now are mostly historical. I don't read a lot of books that were published after 1755. One thing about having friends in New York who belong to the literary world, however, is that I have a steady stream of books coming to the house. That's how I found out about Ben Lerner's "Leaving the Atocha Station", which I'm enjoying. Preston Lauterbach's "The Chitlin' Circuit" is really good. There are writers I seek out. Denis Johnson is a big one.There is no ideal length, but you develop a little interior gauge that tells you whether or not you're supporting the house or detracting from it. When a piece gets too long, the tension goes out of it. That word—tension—has an animal insistence for me. A piece of writing rises and falls with tension. The writer holds one end of the rope and the reader holds the other end—is the rope slack, or is it tight? Does it matter to the reader what the next sentence is going to be?Not any more. With the TV pieces, I was really writing my way out of that interest. Exorcising it. Which isn't to say that I haven't watched “Breaking Bad” and the HBO shows—for anyone who's interested in the science of narrative, it's hard not to be interested in those shows.Not watching TV gets me in a lot of trouble in my household, because my wife and daughter have a lot of shows they like to watch. I joke about throwing our TV in the creek. If that happens, my daughter has an elaborate revenge fantasy where she puts me in the creek on a raft, and I'm allowed one bowl of soup and a cell phone.It's funny you frame it that way, because I was uprooted at 13 and taken to Ohio for high school. Displacement rips something you take for granted—your connection to a place—out of the natural sphere and places it into the abstract, self-conscious sphere, where it becomes something that has to be thought about.There are days when I feel like the Southern identity is all just a bunch of self-serving bullshit that hasn't meant anything in 150 years, but there are also days when I think there's something to it. People speculate that it has to do with historical consciousness, which is probably right. It has to do with the sheer power that comes with marginalisation. A sense of otherness throws your life into a certain relief. People in the south are sensitised to these questions.Since I was a kid I've had an almost pathological sensitivity to landscapes. I remember driving along the side of a highway, seeing a certain kind of place, and literally feeling sick to my stomach. Overpowered. Not in a bad way.Look at Hemingway's Michigan stories and Faulkner's Mississippi stuff. Nobody could say that Hemingway's writing about Michigan isn't dripping with a sense of place—that it isn't observant; that the attention paid to place there isn't deep. The difference is that Hemingway's real interest lies with the characters. They happen to move against the backdrop of a natural world that's very finely observed, but it's not a part of their character. In Faulkner, the landscape is the main character. You get the feeling that he's writing about a wounded landscape.by John Jeremiah Sullivan is out now, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in America.