Face it: kids aren’t cool. They cry for their mommies and play with their poo, fixate on blankies and throw their food. Their taste in music runs to the sweet and singsong. But Neal Pollack is determined that his kid will be different. In his new memoir, Alternadad, the satirist who once staged a reading in a men’s room details his struggle to not only raise a cool kid but stay cool himself. His greatest fear? That he and his wife, a painter, could become the stodgy, self-sacrificing, boring old grown-ups who appear to be the only model of responsible parenting they’ve ever known. In other words: their parents.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Now, everyone knows that the least cool thing of all is being obsessed with being cool, and this is the crack in the foundation of the project. Pollack, a onetime Reader staffer who now lives with his family in Los Angeles, has been perfecting over the years a wry, self-mocking voice in books like The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature in which, through his alter ego “Neal Pollack, the World’s Greatest Living Writer,” he took the stuffing out of the lions of American letters, and there’s some funny stuff here. The early, child-free pages in particular are engaging, as he courts his future bride (“To recap: On the night I met Regina I nagged her because she was late to a movie, vomited twice without telling her, and then made out with her for awhile and went on a long, ill-considered rant about how I didn’t believe in monogamy”) and then makes a poorly planned move from Chicago to Philadelphia, believing that Philly will supply him with the gritty urban experience that gentrifying Chicago simply can’t.
Alternadad’s myopia is all the stranger considering the source. Pollack’s first three books confidently lampooned the self-aggrandizing hypocrisies and mythmaking of novelists, journalists, and rock critics. Here, without the body armor of satire to protect him, he only really rises above the level of light domestic comedy twice–in chapters dealing with the family shitstorm kicked up by the question of whether Elijah should be circumcised and, later, with Elijah’s impulse control problems, which get him expelled from preschool for biting other children. (The 2005 Salon essay from which the biting chapter is adapted brought the wrath of the Internet down upon Pollack and his wife, who were bombarded with e-mail accusing them of being bad, selfish parents–and just generally evil people–for sending Elijah to day care at 21 months and being insufficiently sorrowful about it.)
