Like surprisingly many people, I have always held a vague abhorrence for Neal Pollack. Could it be his claim to be the "Greatest Living American Writer"? His penchant for putting his name in his book titles? Or his jokey, sexist piggishness — supposedly the ironic mantle of a true feminist, but I really have my doubts? I think it's just him.
Well, we learn in Alternadad, there are a few people who do like him, and whom he likes back: his wife, his kid, his family of origin and his in-laws. Which is the book's main flaw. The big shock is supposed to be that, despite being punk rock, Jewish, an unseemly writer, and despised by pockets of lit people throughout the globe — and I mean, who isn't at least some of those? — Neal Pollack is the opposite of abhorrent at home. His family is what Tolstoy warned readers about: the happy one, whose story is all the same, and not very interesting.
Reading Alternadad, I felt jealous (of his unbroken, compatible family) and bored (of his unbroken, compatible family). I don't care about how he and his wife came to agreements about circumcision, private vs. public preschool and biting. It's not ironic to have children.In fact, I don't care about anyone's family but my own, really. And I try not to burden my readers by believing for a second that they care about how cute and intelligent and unusual my children are. And since I don't know what else to say about my children, I generally don't say anything at all.
As a generation (X), what we know for sure is how to be sarcastic and irreverent. Parenthood is bigger than that. It inspires thankfulness, humility, rage, unfixable guilt over what we may be doing to our children, unfixable sorrow over what we now understand for sure was done to us when we were their age, wonder and a quiet sense of sacredness. These emotions are so foreign to us, it took me twelve years (that's how old my eldest is) to even realize that's what was happening. Figuring out how to translate these new feelings and outlooks into literature, and still keep it amusing and intriguing and true, will probably take me another twelve. In the meantime, how pathetic to try to use the tools of yesterday (irony, dirty words, random reference to sex and gross things) to try to tell the story of this new kind of relationship and life we find ourselves in.
Neal obviously thinks he's so wild because he talks about shit-storms. But every parent of every child in the world, as well as dog-owners and workers in various segments of the service industry, have experienced shit flung at inconvenient moments, eaten, or worse. Babble blogger Steve Almond suffers the Alternadad malaise: "Look at me, I used to write about sex, yet I have a kid!" Dude, you're forty. Of course you have a kid. It's not ironic to have children. Yes, yes, I am a near-forty punk-rock sex writer writing about my kids, too. Until we get a handle on the awe and the tragedy that is having children, I think we should stick to magazines. But my editor makes me (and Steve)! This is a parenting magazine! No one made Neal write that book. A further distinction: I try to let my kids speak for themselves, as human beings, to express their own ideas, instead of me going on and on about the miracle of first haircut (barf!).
Until we get a handle on the awe and the tragedy that is having children, I think we should stick to magazines. Because, I mean, we shouldn't just shut up either, just because we're raw and awkward. Online magazines are the perfect place to make our mistakes and not have it matter. Because if our reader opens one article and it's crappy, they can just hit "close" and click on something else.
This week, my two favorite articles on Babble were both by non-parents. The essay by John Freeman — on wanting children but being with a woman who doesn't — is not any of the things that bug me about Alternadad: predictable, self-satisfied, trying to be funny. In fact, it ends with about the opposite-est you can get from all that, with John realizing that this "untethered sense of existence feels like betrayal." I learned something new (yet somehow familiar) about the human condition then. I didn't learn anything new from Lisa Gabriele's W.C. Fields-y column, my other favorite Babble moment, but I did relate more to the way she relates to children — with black humor and a borderline vicious honesty that I can't imagine any child psychologist advocating — than I ever did to another actual mom.
©2007 Lisa Carver and Nerve Media
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