The Cool Pop Shtick

ALTERNADAD

By Neal Pollack

Pantheon. 288 pp. $23.95

I wish I were Neal Pollack's brother. Then I'd have some automatic interest in hearing an exhaustive narrative of how he met his wife. I'd want to know all the quaint and comic details of how the couple tried to raise their toddler son to be as cool as his sometimes-rocker dad.

I'm not. I don't.

"Alternadad" is the new memoir in which Pollack, a comic essayist and Olympian self-promoter, sets out all this domestic incident. It reads like a 288-page Christmas letter, sent to all and sundry by that "clever" member of the family who took a couple of creative writing classes in college.

The book gives us 20 blow-by-blow, date-stamped chapters about the first five years of Pollack's family life: one entire chapter about the baby's foreskin and the extended family's debate about its fate; page after page on house-hunting in Philadelphia and then Austin, on the family's financial woes, on Pollack's weed consumption; detailed accounts of little Elijah's first haircut, his tendency to put things up his nose, his biting habit, his first trip to the movies and the particular brands of juice favored by his day care.

As a bald list of incidents, it sounds as though there could be comic potential in all this. Spelled out in agonizing detail in this book, it becomes mind-numbing.

By Page 238, when Pollack goes into yet another droll anecdote about his toddler's behavior, which includes such fascinating details as young Elijah kissing his plastic dolphin, peeing on Pollack's foot, eating undefrosted frozen corn, drinking soy milk, sharing an orange with his dad and then the two saying good night to each other precisely eight times, even Pollack's closest sibling would start dreaming of a warm bath and a sharp razor.

How's this for a gripping passage, taken verbatim from that episode?

"We sat on the couch and I peeled a tangerine. He lifted his sippy cup to my lips.

" 'Daddy drink soy milk?'