Book review: Pulphead by John Jeremiah Sullivan

I HATE John Jeremiah Sullivan. He gets thousands of words – “long-form journalism”, the Americans call it – for a feature on Axl Rose. He uses up lots of them on his teenage obsession with Guns N’ Roses.

Pulphead

John Jeremiah Sullivan

Vintage, £9.99

He follows the band all the way to Bilbao. He doesn’t get the interview with Rose. He dares to submit his copy without any quotes, save for “Ooooooo, I need you.” The magazine publishes the piece, doubtless big-style. And what do I get? A few hundred to tell you that the book which wraps it up with essays on cave paintings, the Tea Party, reality TV, but mostly music, is terrific.

Compared, with good reason, to David Foster Wallace, JJS uses his bountiful words well, writing unhurriedly with warmth and quiet insight, and resisting the temptation to sneer at soft targets (eg, his piece on a Christian rock ­festival).

He’s got a winning way of describing things, too, such as Axl’s odd new appearance: “To me he looks like he’s wearing an Axl Rose mask. He looks like a man I saw eating by himself at a truckstop in Monteagle, Tennessee, at two o’clock in the morning about 12 years ago.”

Or Rose’s habit, after each line sung, of “gazing at the crowd with those strangely startled yet fearless eyes, as though we had just surprised him in his den, tearing into some carrion”. Sullivan gets Rose’s oldest childhood friend to talk, for the first time, and it doesn’t really matter that the main man won’t.

Michael Jackson obviously can’t speak to Sullivan. What’s left to say about him? “It’s odd to write about a person knowing he may have been, but not if he was, a serial child molester.” But the author takes you right inside the recording studio; shows you how the magic was made. Jackson “warrants and will no doubt one day receive a serious, objective biography; all the great cultural strains of American music came together in him.” Sullivan’s the man for the job, dammit.

Edinburgh International Book Festival, Saturday, 8.30pm