When I was twenty years old, I became a kind of apprentice to a man named Andrew Lytle, whom pretty much no one apart from his negligibly less ancient sister, Polly, had addressed except as Mister Lytle in at least a decade. She called him Brother. Or Brutha—I don’t suppose either of them had ever voiced a terminal r.
It was maybe an hour before midnight at the Avalon Nightclub in Chapel Hill, and the Miz was feeling nervous. I didn’t pick up on this at the time—I mean, I couldn’t tell. To me he looked like he’s always looked, like he’s looked since his debut season, back when I first fell in love with his antics: all bright-eyed and symmetrical-faced, fed on genetically modified corn, with the swollen, hairless torso of the aspiring professional wrestler he happened to be and a smile you could spot as Midwestern American in a blimp shot of a soccer stadium.
Late in 1998 or early in ’99—during the winter that straddled the two—I spent a night on and off the telephone with a person named John Fahey.
The first moves with the courteous lento of one of Peter Taylor’s stories; the last has the directness of something by Raymond Carver; the second, more placeless and more contemporary, could be by lots of writers—Jennifer Egan, or maybe Sam Lipsyte. Actually, all are the opening sentences of essays by John Jeremiah Sullivan, from his second book, “Pulphead” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $16). It is obvious enough that they are by a talented storyteller, who has learned from fiction (as well as from the essayistic tradition) how to structure and ration his narratives. He seems to have in abundance the storyteller’s gifts: he is a fierce noticer, is undauntedly curious, is porous to gossip, and has a memory of childlike tenacity. Anecdotes fly off the wheels of his larger narratives. In a touching piece about the near-death of his brother (who electrocuted himself with a microphone while playing with his band, the Moviegoers, in a garage in Lexington, Kentucky), Sullivan mentions, in passing, “Captain Clarence Jones, the fireman and paramedic who brought Worth back to life, strangely with two hundred joules of pure electric shock (and who later responded to my grandmother’s effusive thanks by giving all the credit to the Lord).” Any reporter can be specific about the two hundred joules. But the detail about Captain Jones giving all the credit to the Lord, while a small thing, suggests a writer interested in human stories, watching, remembering, and sticking around long enough to be generally hospitable to otherness.

Such moments occur again and again in Sullivan’s work. In the same essay, he mentions his father, who is shocked into life by a brief bolt of story: “My father was a great Mark Twain fanatic—he got fired from the only teaching job he ever held for keeping the first graders in at recess, to make them listen to records of an actor reading the master’s works.” In “Mr. Lytle: An Essay,” his memoir of the Tennessean writer Andrew Lytle, he remembers receiving letters from the old man, “their envelopes . . . still faintly curled from having been rolled through the heavy typewriter.” He notices that Lytle’s equally aged sister has hands whose knuckles are “cubed with arthritis.” Lytle himself sags so exaggeratedly into the sofa, “it was as if thieves had crept through and stolen his bones and left him there.”

Sullivan has a very good eye—he memorably describes the Virgin Group tycoon, Sir Richard Branson, as “that weird and whispery mogul-faun, Sir Richard”—and ears pricked for eventuality. In the book’s first essay, “Upon This Rock,” which originally appeared in the magazine GQ, Sullivan spends a few days at a Christian rock festival called Creation. It is the nation’s biggest Christian-music gathering, and it takes place at a farm by the name of Agape, in rural Pennsylvania. Once at Creation, Sullivan falls in with a group of young guys from West Virginia—Ritter, Darius, Jake, Bub, Josh, and Pee Wee. Ritter (“one of those fat men who don’t really have any fat, a corrections officer”) describes them as “just a bunch of West Virginia guys on fire for Christ.” No decent writer could go wrong with what we imagine to be the heady hideousness of a Christian rock festival, and these West Virginians on fire for Christ are juicy material: Just-So Stories from the unfathomable evangelical jungle, waiting to be written up by the compensated connoisseur once he has returned to civilization. But not only does Sullivan avoid condescension; he admires his new friends, listens to them, and quietly compacts an enormous amount of acquired information into his prose. A wide gulf separates the upper-class Sullivan, born in Kentucky into a family with deep historical roots there, who followed his grandfather to the privileged University of the South, in Sewanee, Tennessee, from Ritter and his crew, but the gulf vanishes when Sullivan writes:

In their lives, they had known terrific violence. Ritter and Darius met, in fact, when each was beating the shit out of the other in middle-school math class. Who won? Ritter looked at Darius, as if to clear his answer, and said, “Nobody.” Jake once took a fishing pole that Darius had accidentally stepped on and broken and beat him to the ground with it. “I told him, ‘Well, watch where you’re stepping,’ ” Jake said. (This memory made Darius laugh so hard he removed his glasses.) Half of their childhood friends had been murdered—shot or stabbed over drugs or nothing. Others had killed themselves. . . . When Darius was growing up, his father was in and out of jail; at least once, his father had done hard time. In Ohio he stabbed a man in the chest (the man had refused to stop “pounding on” Darius’s grandfather). Darius caught a lot of grief—“Your daddy’s a jailbird!”—during those years. He’d carried a chip on his shoulder from that. “You came up pretty rough,” I said.
“Not really,” Darius said. “Some people ain’t got hands and feet.” He talked about how much he loved his father. “With all my heart—he’s the best. He’s brought me up the way that I am.
“And anyway,” he added, “I gave all that to God—all that anger and stuff He took it away.”
God in His wisdom had left him enough to get by on.
Sullivan, who is thirty-seven, and whose pieces have appeared in places like Harper’s, GQ, The Oxford American, and The Paris Review in the past decade, has been compared to Tom Wolfe and David Foster Wallace. But he is kinder than the former, and less neurotic than the latter (whose own compassionate sensitivity got blocked by obsessive self-consciousness, or, when unblocked, sometimes emerged as outright sentimentality). In the essay about the Christian rock festival, he keeps a clear, unillusioned eye on his new friends, but he also takes their faith seriously, partly because, as he explains, he himself spent a few teen-age years under the evangelical spell. Like many others, he has had his “Jesus phase”: “That’s always an excellent laugh. Except a phase is supposed to end—or at least give way to other phases—not simply expand into a long preoccupation.” That afterlife, that “long preoccupation,” can be felt in some of the other pieces in this book. A dense and involving essay about the early-nineteenth-century French explorer and botanist Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, who travelled around the South (and “wound up living with my great-great-great-great-great-grandparents Luke and Ann Usher” in Lexington, Kentucky), ends with an eloquent summary of Rafinesque’s original theology, inflected by Sullivan’s own clear admiration:

What’s true of us is true of nature. If we are conscious, as our species seems to have become, then nature is conscious. Nature became conscious in us, perhaps in order to observe itself. It may be holding us out and turning us around like a crab does its eyeball. Whatever the reason, that thing out there, with the black holes and the nebulae and whatnot, is conscious. One cannot look in the mirror and rationally deny this. It experiences love and desire, or thinks it does. The idea is enough to render the Judeo-Christian cosmos sort of quaint. . . . Rafinesque perfected his variant of this honorable philosophy while botanizing in the literal backyards of my childhood, examining ruderal plants I’ve known all my life, and so I have appropriated it from him, with minor tweaks. It works perfectly as a religion. Others talk about God, and I feel we can sit together, that God is one of this thing’s masks, or that this thing is God.
Notice the way in which Sullivan’s prose, bending itself around its subject, has taken on a little nineteenth-century American diction, with hints of Emerson and Thoreau (“I feel we can sit together”). Unlike Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion, who bring their famous styles along with them like well-set, just-done hair, Sullivan lets his subjects muss and alter his prose; he works like a novelist.