‘Neal Pollack’ Is A Sometimes-Fun Ego Trip

At first glance, the “Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature” appears to be a simple, academic collection of short stories. Look a little harder and you will find a satire that is incredibly funny at first, slow moving in the middle and utterly repulsive at the end. Neal Pollack, the author, calls the stories fictitious non-fiction. Neal Pollack, the fictional character, is an international playboy, literary journalist and the greatest living author in the world today.

Initially, the reader is caught off-guard by the faux reviews from such famous, and long since dead, critics as Edgar Allen Poe. Pollack, who insists on posing in the nude for the author’s picture, also fictitiously places himself in photographs with John F. Kennedy, Mia Farrow, Fidel Castro and the soldiers at Mai Lai in Vietnam. Just in case the reader is puzzled about the crazy antics of Pollack, the character, he conveniently includes a family tree and timeline of his life. Although he is 31 in real life, he appears to be nearly 70 in the novel and to have bloodlines that hail from Christina Aguilera, Simón BolÌvar and Penelope Cruz. Confused yet?

Among the more hilarious entries into this diary of “his life” is his surprise appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show with Toni Morrison. He tells the audience that: “Oprah expanded my readership like no television program ever; not even my brief stint on Laugh-In gave me such wide exposure to Ma and Pa United States.” Toni Morrison tells the audience that she learned about African-American life from reading one of Pollack’s novels. Yes, that would be a white, balding male telling Toni Morrison how African-Americans really live.

If you haven’t figured it out by now, Pollack is full of himself. He makes this abundantly clear in chapters titled “I have slept with five hundred women” and “Why am I so handsome?” However, his best writing comes out when he poses as a journalist and forgets about his gargantuan ego. “Confessions of a hard-core heroin user,” “The Albania of my Existence” and “I am friends with a working-class black woman” all had me on the floor laughing at his brilliant ability to satirize the news industry in only a page or two.

Pollack runs into some problems when he attempts to write longer chapters. With the longer chapters come endless references to how he is the greatest writer in the world (after all, he did supposedly win a Pulitzer, a Nobel peace prize and two PEN/Faulkner awards), how hundreds of women throw themselves at him and how he truly is the sexiest man alive. Just to prove that he is the greatest writer and world’s smartest man, he has a tendency to drop names and make arcane references more often then the writers of Family Guy. Most normally educated people would not recognize eighty-five percent of the people he mentions. In one instance, he sets up author Michael Chabon (“Wonder Boys”) with a prostitute. The only problem lies in the fact that most people don’t know who Chabon is. Now take a contemporary example like that and imagine Pollack making similar references to historical figures from the past two thousand years.

The book simply loses steam toward the end. I found myself absolutely turned off by his pompous attitude and increasingly long chapters. The second half of the book does lend itself to a select number of comical incidents, such as his stint in the porn industry as Ernest Hemingcock, or his continued reference to “the magical weed that is marijuana.” Still, it is not enough to save the reader from counting the pages until the end of the book. If you’re looking for a quick, light read with occasional spurts of humor, look no further. However, if you are looking for a truly exhilarating satire on the state of affairs in the world today, look somewhere else.