Alternadad
By Neal Pollack, Pantheon Books, 2007

      Neal Pollack’s parenting memoir, Alternadad, is not quite as edgy as it wants us to think it is. Although rife with fashionable “ironic skepticism” (the author’s words from the jacket copy), drug use and endless discussions concerning indie rock bands and the concept of coolness, the book reads more like a lengthy, not-very-exciting blog about being a dad than a nihilistic, punk-rock manifesto. Neal and Regina Pollack, despite their self-consciously arty self-images, are actually pretty unexceptional American Gen-X parents, a fact that can be seen as either condemnation of their parenting abilities or grounds for forgiveness.

      It’s tempting to judge the Pollacks harshly. The author doesn’t exactly make himself or his wife out to be terribly sympathetic characters. In fact, they come off as off-puttingly self-centered and immature. Both the children of upper-middle-class parents, Pollack and his wife, already well into their 30s, are locked in what looks like an extremely extended adolescent rebellion. They leave Chicago when their neighborhood, which they had preferred to think of as fashionably seedy, begins to take on the scent of yuppie-dom. After a trip to Philadelphia, during which they see street vendors warming themselves over trash-can fires, the pair decide that the grimy areas of Philly look more like the neighborhood they see themselves living in – in other words, a neighborhood as much unlike the comfortable suburbia of their childhoods as possible. Unfortunately, they quickly discover that a genuinely seedy neighborhood (as opposed to one that just looks seedy) hosts lots of actual crime and unsavory-ness, a prospect for which the middle-class kids are not prepared.

      After a trip to Austin during South by Southwest, Pollack decides that he’d rather live in a city where everyone is into cool indie bands, so he and Regina flee Philly and buy a crappy house in a seedy Austin neighborhood. To their shock, however, they find that even in a city with lots of indie-band-loving hipsters, seedy neighborhoods are still crime-ridden. Unhappiness ensues.

      In the middle of all this, Pollack and his wife have a baby, thus making the pair of perpetual adolescents into parents. They vow to be “cool” parents, which means that they will not have their lives controlled by a child. If they want to go to a concert at midnight on a weekday, they (or at least Neal) will. It also means that Neal will dress his kid in shirts with indie-band logos and explain to him which "Sesame Street" characters suck.

      It’s hard to decide which Pollack parent ends up looking worse. Regina appears to be a whiner who can’t stop complaining that motherhood has ruined her life and career by monopolizing her time. Never mind that for the first 18 months of little Elijah’s life the author claims that all she does is nurse the kid and watch the Sci-fi Channel. Still, she finds little time to paint her pictures of bound-and-gagged women (which, of course, symbolize the debilitating constraints placed on women by the patriarchal society and which, also, go a long way to explaining why her work isn’t setting the art world on fire).

      Regina also becomes an organi-facist. From the moment she learns she’s pregnant she buys into every lefty-antiestablishment-natural-postcolonial-yuppie parenting fad in the book (or, rather, in a big stack of books). She attends her Bradley method classes; hires a doula; shops for expensive fair-trade, organic baby products; rails against the sadistic medical profession; and forces the whole family to eat nothing but the most expensive gourmet natural, organic, fair-trade, cruelty- and-dairy-free, whole grain, nitrate-less food available. Fortunately for Neal, she doesn’t seem to have a major problem with his expensive and time-consuming marijuana habit, and she herself enjoys the occasional opportunity to go out and get really drunk.

      Neal isn’t much more grown-up. Besides the previously mentioned marijuana smoking, which he does with Cheech and Chong-like enthusiasm, he feels that it’s important to keep up his social life – which he likes to think of as research for his writing – by going out with friends until all hours, leaving Regina to take care of the kid (but he only does it three times a week or so). Plus, just before Elijah’s first birthday, Neal forms a rock band and hits the road for a month. He makes up for his absenteeism, he thinks, by playing games with Elijah for two hours a day (or sometimes an hour and a half if he needs to get some work done) so Regina can have a break.

      When Elijah starts terrorizing his preschool classmates, hitting, scratching and especially biting, the Pollacks are in a quandry. What have they done wrong? Is it possible to blame the whole thing on the school and its teachers? When Pollack writes an essay to that effect on Salon.com, readers are vicious in their reactions. Of course, such rotten, childish parents are going to have a rotten kid, they write. The real victim is Elijah, who is destined to be a failure because his parents are such idiots.

      Although Alternadad doesn’t present Pollack and his wife as the most mature or competent parents in the world, the kind of criticism unleashed by Salon readers would be unfair in response to the book. Neal and Regina obviously love Elijah very much, and the motivation for their parenting choices is nothing more than the desire to give him a safe and happy life. Is it their fault that they are part of an American generation that has been taught that adulthood is oppressive and fatal, that responsibility is another word for surrender to the Man, that individuality is the most important personal characteristic, that rebellion is noble in itself and requires no thought? For them, the best thing they can do for their kid is to create for him the childhoods they wished they’d had, the same childhoods they’re creating for themselves in their 30s.

      Pollack, too, is part of the new generation of dads who, in reaction to the mythically aloof fathers of 1950s television, want to be congratulated simply for being aware of their kids. Children for them are playmates, and play-acting and silly songs are sufficient antidotes for the emotional distance of yesteryear.

      But Pollack is apparently contrite for all his parenting mistakes (which, frankly, aren’t very serious), and there is no question that he wants the best for Elijah. If he’s ill equipped to make the right decisions much of the time, he is at least trying, and for that he deserves, if not praise, at least a moratorium on the vitriol. The problem with Alternadad is not that it’s a memoir written by a bad parent, but that it’s a memoir written by an ordinary parent who doesn’t have a tremendous amount of interesting insight into parenthood.

Copyright 2007 Ad Media Inc.