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‘Alternadad’ review

There’s nothing particularly new about the style of parenting described in Neal Pollack’s nonetheless revelatory and very funny new book “Alternadad.” Long before today’s tattooed punks and indie-minded hipsters entered the final frontier of family life, what might be called Cool Parents have been struggling to maintain their anti-establishment cred as they faced such deeply uncool concerns as diaper rash, separation anxiety and infant regurgitation. Back in the seventies, these were the parents who dragged their offspring to Jackson Browne shows in unfortunate combinations of denim and corduroy. They were the buyers of bataka bats, the devotees of “Free to Be You and Me,” the dads and moms whose kids ran wild at late-night pot-lucks as they rapped about Carl Sagan and Nuclear Freeze initiatives.

Today’s generation of Cool Parents are no less noticeable. They’re the stubbly stay-at-home dads balancing Baby Bjorn-strapped infants and double lattes at the no-logo coffee bar. They’re the ropy-armed post-feminists who trade couscous recipes at mommy-and-me yoga groups. And they’re the expectant couples who arrive at the delivery room with doulas and organic unguents and carefully compiled mix CDs.

All of which could easily make for an amusing pop culture survey – one could easily devote a sizable volume to alternaparent-approved hairstyles (the feathered shag, the ironic mullet), clothing (Che Guerva mini-Ts, kitschy cowboy duds) and music (They Might Be Giants, Dan Zanes). And indeed, Pollack spends a good deal of this book obsessing over such signifiers, detailing for instance his campaign to indoctrinate his two-year old son Elijah in his worship for the Ramones and his disdain for that punching bag of Cool Parents and their precocious kids alike, Barney.

Thankfully, Pollack digs at least a little deeper, dipping into a deep reservoir of aspirations and insecurities that inform Cool Parents’ pop culture posturing. To Pollack, being an alternadad is about “trying to retain a shred of pre-child identity” in a lifestage other parents greet as a cultural dead zone. It’s about becoming a parent without giving up stuff you’ve always enjoyed, be it psycho polka or anime or high-grade marijuana. It’s about calling into question aspects of childrearing other parents accept wholesale, from circumcision to nutrition to whether mom or dad gets up with the little one at six a.m. after a late night of margaritas.

Pollack touches on these thorny issues in what is, as square as it sounds, a straightforward parenting memoir. This is a nice surprise, coming as it does from a former star of the McSweeny’s stable with two faux memoirs under his belt (in which he took clever jabs at rock and celebrity under the guise of “Neal Pollack, America’s greatest living writer”). Here, he forgoes the shticky alter ego and presents himself simply as a harried new dad, albeit one with the jokey cluelessness of a guy who took his nine-month pregnant wife to a Beck show in the hopes that their in-utero infant would soak up their refined musical taste. After a traumatic c-section, he followed his newborn into the hospital nursery and introduced himself thusly, “Are you ready to rock? Are you ready to party? Are you ready to have a good time with daddy?”

Which pretty much sums up Pollack’s approach to fatherhood, at least in his son Elijah’s first year. Three months after his birth, Pollack took off for a wild weekend in Amsterdam, where he got very high at a poetry conference, doused himself in a pitcher of water and delivered an ironic rant that concluded “All hail the United States of America, where literature kicks big ass.” Back at home, he found himself consumed by a never-realized rock fantasy, forming a mediocre punk band called the Neal Pollack Experience and taking off on a doomed three week tour of Northeastern dive bars.

All this will certainly come off to many others as deeply selfish and even pathetic. Even if you were raised by Cool Parents yourself, even if you think of yourself as cool, there’s something reflexively off-putting – wrong, even – about parents who cling so desperately to their own formative floundering years, or worse, who suffer from what Pollack calls “the corrosive notion of child as hip, wacky fashion accessory.” After all, kids have enough developmental milestones to overcome without having to deal with their parents’ efforts to cultivate an image of freethinking non-conformity as they buy shop for diapers at Target.

But Pollack is smart enough not to glorify his foolishness – he’s always the butt of his jokes. He cops, for instance, to the absurdity of his suggestion that he and his wife hand out yellow and red cards when Elijah misbehaves, the ultimate punishment henceforth being known as the “Penalty Box.” “I decided that ‘time out’ needed a cooler name,” he writes. “Apparently it had eluded me that punishment, by its very nature, shouldn’t be cool.” And he is self-aware enough to realize that it was probably a mistake to take the whole family to a sold-out jam-band festival in the height of summer. While he’d never admit to engaging in anything as dorky as soul searching, “Alternadad” is ultimately about the gradual acceptance and – dare one say it – maturation of a father.

That maturation ultimately takes Pollack to come unexpected places. The charming “authenticity” of his neighborhood on the outskirts of Austin suddenly appears merely scary, prompting him to spearhead a neighborhood association campaign to involve the police and drive out crime. An outburst of what Elijah’s teachers call “poor impulse control” forces him to negotiate the exquisitely complicated realm of preschool politics. But perhaps the nicest lesson he learns along the way involves his relationship with Elijah. He writes deliciously about his young son’s malapropisms and imaginary playmates, about the intense satisfaction they get joking and moshing and telling stories together. More traditional dads surely love their kids just as much as alternadads, but rarely has the bond felt more moving than it does here.

While Pollack ends his book with Elijah still in preschool and his family’s move to the equally cool ‘burgh of Highland Park here in L.A., you’re left to wonder how this story will play out over the long term. Adolescence will come knocking, and when it does, you can only guess what all those kids in their itty-bitty Doc Martens and tiny Mohawks will rebel against. Perhaps the early exposure to power chords and organic foodstuffs will reduce the chances they’ll hate their parents as teens. But it isn’t hard to imagine this generation of Cool Parents ushering forth a new wave of buttoned-down, Alex P. Keaton neo-conservatives. In other words, if you dress you kid in a Sex Pistols onesie, will they grow up Republican? Now, that would be uncool.