The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature
Originally appeared in The Dec. I don’t remember when, and I can’t look it up because I made such a crappy webmaster.
Neal Pollack is the greatest American writer to have ever lived. He has written for The New Yorker, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many other literary organizations that begin with “The New.” He has written over forty books, won the Pulitzer prize and the National Book Award (three times!), and has been twice selected as a member of Oprah’s Book Club. He is fluent in Spanish, was close friends with John McCain, and has posed undercover as a transgendered teenager to get the scoop. He is elegant, dashing, charming and, above all else, handsome. He has slept with over 500 women. Wait. You’ve never heard of him? What do you mean? Are you culturally ignorant? Stupid? A pitiful excuse for a human being?
Actually, you probably just don’t read McSweeney’s, the upstart literary magazine founded by Dave Eggers of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and Might Magazine fame (and whether or not this makes you culturally ignorant is a discussion for another day). Pollack, a columnist for the Chicago Reader, has been writing extensively for both the print version and the online journal (www.mcsweeneys.net) of McSweeney’s for the past year. He has been writing so extensively, in fact, that many reviewers believed him to be Eggers himself, a situation that slightly angered Pollack, Eggers, and Pollack’s mother, to say the least.
Pollack has now completed a compendium of his work, except that it isn’t much of a compendium at all. The book is, instead, almost completely original, though some of his pieces for McSweeney’s, such as “Europe: the Forgotten Continent,” are mentioned as his literary works of genius. The basic notion behind the Anthology is that, in addition to being a great novelist, etc, Pollack has also written great pieces of journalism, which he is now, finally, sharing with a deserving public in one essential volume.
His writing style is, unfortunately, somewhat difficult to describe. For the most part, Pollack takes freelance writing’s bloated sense of ego to the extreme. To picture this, take your favorite Dec article, and imagine how it would have sounded if the author was twenty times more egotistical than he or she really is (in the event you chose Mark Grabowski as your base, make it just five times more self-important). Then retitle it with something along the lines of, “The Albania of My Existence,” “Introduction to the New Slavery,” or “An Interview with My Sister, Who Is a Lesbian.”
For example, in “I Am Friends with a Working Class Black Woman,” Pollack’s analysis of life in the South Bronx, he writes, “Then I realized: I was friends with this woman, this Cora Johnson, this subject of mine. I’d had black friends before