The Cool Pop Shtick

" 'No. That's yours.'

"He drank. He picked up a tangerine wedge.

" 'Daddy eat?'

"I looked at the wedge. It was an organic temptress.

" 'Sure.'

"We fed each other tangerine wedges until it was time for bed."

The book's not all this dull. There are moments in Pollack's writing that broke me up, Dave Barry-style, such as when he recalls the end of his first date with his future wife:

" 'I don't think it's going to work out,' she said.

"To recap: On the night I met Regina, I nagged her because she was late to a movie, vomited twice without telling her, and then made out with her for a while, and went on a long, ill-considered rant about how I didn't believe in monogamy.

" 'Why?' I said."

The book has other passages that made me laugh aloud. Three of them. In almost 300 pages.

Of course, Pollack's "comedy" is supposed to be at the service of a larger idea. "Alternadad" is supposed to let us in on what it's like to be a father and a hipster, with maybe a few tips on how both states might be managed at once.

The problem is that in his book, Pollack comes off about as cool as Laura Bush.

"Alternadad" has got the trappings of cool, laid on thick. It's full of casual-seeming references to pop culture, old and new, meant to guarantee its author's with-it status. There's a passing nod to "peals of ecstasy of the type not heard since the mid-1970s public appearances of Steven Tyler," to moving "like an extra in a George Romero movie." Witnessing a friend's pregnancy, Pollack specifies that he "felt a little bit like a member of the third gender in 'Stranger in a Strange Land,' though I hate it when people use the verb 'to grok.' " Who doesn't?

"Alternadad" also has the snideness requisite to contemporary hip, as when Pollack goes to a park in Austin -- which, by his own account, he moved to with his young family exclusively for its "groove" -- and complains about the other parents: "They listened to 'Fresh Air' and subscribed to The New Yorker. Well, so did I, but unlike me, they actually liked those things." Of course, Pollack makes noises about knowing that he's really a slacker and a dweeb and hints broadly that his hipster aspirations are ironic, to be taken with a grain of salt. Which, since punk at least, has been a classic strategy for showing off how hip you really are.

"Alternadad" isn't a convincing demonstration of cool. It's a desperate proclamation of it, identical in boastful spirit to when Pollack describes a childhood photo of himself reading a newspaper and has to add, "Yes, I was reading at four years old."

Five hundred years ago in Italy, Baldassare Castiglione, the true godfather of cool, laid out the idea of "sprezzatura" -- the notion that real coolness needs to be so completely nonchalant that there's no sign its owner even knows he's cool or ever has to work at it.

Here's Pollack on his ambitions for his son: "I silently pledged to myself that my son would not have a generic American childhood. My kid was going to be cool."

Uncool, dude.