Nonfiction Pizza Party
John Jeremiah Sullivan [JJS] recently published his second New York Times Magazine cover story in five weeks. In some ways the piece, “Where is Cuba Going?” is a return to the style of reported essay that earned his first collection, Pulphead a mass of praise. Ready to breakdown one of my favorite writers, I emailed Barnstorm co-editor and JJS scholar Erin Somers. She emailed back. Yada, yada. Nonfiction Pizza Party: Ok, to start, you saw JJS read last winter. Could you give a quick rundown of the event and anything else worth telling? Also, in photos his head looks pretty giant. In person, bigger or smaller than expected? Erin Somers: I saw JJS at the New York Public Library. He was in conversation with Wells Tower about Pulphead, which had just come out. It was of course very cool. For starters, you had to go through all these winding halls and up and down stairs and ride in elevators and basically slay a minotaur to get to the room where it was held deep in the bowels of the library (I made that same minotaur joke in one of the elevators and no one laughed). Both Tower and Sullivan were incredibly smart and articulate and amusing. I love both of their stuff (Tower writes nonfiction in addition to his fiction that you should check out if you haven't) and it was exciting to see two dudes who really respect each other talking about writing. It was like LITERATURE: IT'S WHERE IT'S AT. JJS actually seemed a bit on the small-headed side? As far as head to shoulder ratios are concerned? Maybe I'm not a great judge of heads though. Let's email him and ask for his hat size. Tower read aloud from "Feet in Smoke," which is my favorite essay in the collection. It's maybe not as funny as some of the others like "Upon this Rock" or the one about the Real World. But I don't know, it moves me, man. Do you have a favorite from Pulphead? NPP: "Mr. Lytle: An Essay." The more times I read it, the more I realize how crazy high its difficulty factor is. My favorite type of JJS essay [JJeSsay]: Because of his life experience and skill, he pulls off pieces others just can't.But my favorite of his, and the first I read, actually isn't in Pulphead. The Disney World Essay aka "You Blow My Mind. Hey Mickey!" is touching and weird and fun (oh yeah, literature can be fun), a first person narrative about taking your family to Disney World, and smoking weed, and the commercial history of Florida, and a boy named Lil' Dog”¦.And it works. And he writes things like, "It seems like a lot of what you end up doing as a parent is trying to figure out ways to save your children from you”¦.How many of my genes had [my daughter] inherited, and could I teach her how to play them better? You want joy for your children, but you yourself have brought them into this world of suffering." Chest shudder. Deep breath. Continue reading.His new piece reminded me of The Disney World Essay. What was your initial reaction to “Where is Cuba Going?”ES: I liked it a lot. I have a long-held vague romantic fantasy about Cuba. That it's a place where you could go (somehow, maybe through Canada?) and do a sort of Rum Diary/The Sun Also Rises type of adventure, having close scrapes and riding around in mint green 1950s convertibles and pulling off mid-century haberdashery without looking like Lindsey Lohan circa her Sam Ronson phase. I think this is probably a widely held notion in the US, a forbidden fruit effect. Turns out all of that is wildly inaccurate. It's easy to forget that Cuba is a super-repressive authoritarian dictatorship, a de facto prison where, as we learn at the end, "everyone is afraid."So JJS gives us all this: a good amount of Cuban history, a rundown of US relations including as much as we could possibly grasp about the embargo, which is pretty byzantine by the sound of it, lush description of what the place actually looks like, a portrait of its denizens and their love/hate relationship with it. AND he does it through the lens of his very personal family stakes. AND there are moments of levity and wry humor that we've grown to expect from him. I'd say it's a successful piece. What about you? NPP: I'm with you. I enjoyed it much more than his two other recent Times pieces (Ireland and the Williams sisters), which were fine and all, but that's kind of like saying your date was nice.I see "Where is Cuba Going?" as a marriage between his recent restraint and the wry observation of his earlier GQ stories. Of course there are counter examples, and he's touched on politics before, but the essay feels like a step. Maybe sideways, maybe forwards, definitely not back. In some of the pieces we've mentioned, JJS takes a simple, maybe small subject, and just writes the shit out of it. He pulls it open to reveal all the types of things he's known for. The Cuba piece is a little different. He starts with a giant topic and focuses in.The passage at the hotel pool might show some of this: “It was Speedos and bikinis, no matter the age or body type....I took in veins and cellulite, paunches and man-paps, the weird shinglelike sagging that starts to occur on the back of the thighs, cleavage that showed a spoiled-grape-like wrinkling, the ash-mottled skin of permanently sun-torched shoulders, all of it beautiful. All of it beautiful and tormenting....Everybody was stealing looks at one another, envying or disdaining or gazing, like me. We were all inside a matrix of lust and erotic sadness, all turning into versions of one another, or seeing our past selves.”I'm not convinced this scene completely works, but damn, he's using grotesque body descriptions to write about the mind-numbing complexity of international relations.ES: Yeah, I agree that scene is incredible. It kind of exemplifies what I think is JJS' greatest strength, and the number one quality people look for in literature—the ability to express what it is to be a human being. He doesn't nail it every time, but man he gets close. And when he does it's a rare and special thing. NPP: JJS seems to be pretty conscious of the shifts in his writing style. On his first person narrator, he's said, "I'm a little sick of that guy,” and, “I really want to try something different that's moving into a more complete third person.” Apparently he's working on a research-heavy book about "an 18th-century figure, a German lawyer, who left a stable well-to-do existence behind and went into the North American forest, where he lived among Native American tribes and worked to unite them against colonialism." He's already been researching for over five years! Damn boy!So what do you think about a writer's need to evolve? A necessary challenge? A blessing in disguise? Should we not worry about it and let it happen naturally?Which modern writers have pulled this off especially well?ES: I get what he's talking about. On one hand, I think it's a mistake to try to play against your strengths. JJS' first person voice is the thing that distinguishes him, his obvious strength. So part of me thinks he shouldn't resist that. It's like when Shaq makes a rap album or something. [NPP says, let the record show that Shaq Diesel is a solid album.] I'm like, just do what you're good at, jeez. Have some respect for your specific talents. On the other hand, the impulse to stretch and try things is also important for a writer. Who knows, maybe this book about the 18th c. German lawyer will be awesome.I can't think of many writers who tried to go in a different direction and pulled it off completely. Even the great Flannery O'Connor, one of the masters of the short story, falters in her novel, Wise Blood. But if we broaden it to art at large, you can find successful examples. For instance Woody Allen could have limited his range to comedy. We'd maybe get more stuff like Bananas and Love and Death and Annie Hall. But he'd have never made Crimes and Misdemeanors, which has a serious edge and is an incredible movie. So I guess my answer to should writers try to evolve is "I don't know," or maybe, "Yeah I guess, everyone should just do whatever and see how it goes."