In the three years since Neal Pollack hustled to minor-league celebrity with the publication of The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature, he’s inspired his share of critical bile. Ask the bookish if you should pick up his first volume–a parodic portrait gallery of literary cliches–and the response will often be “Pfft. One-trick pony,” or the pithier “What an asshole.” But the strangest dismissal of the former Reader writer to date has to be the one made early on by a San Diego writer who said he didn’t exist–that “Neal Pollack” was a pen name for McSweeney’s editor Dave Eggers, whose publishing imprint put out the book.
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That rumor was quickly debunked–in a letter to the editor by Pollack’s mother–but Pollack has had a hard time disentangling his name from Eggers’s ever since. Yet as Pollack pointed out when accused last month on the literary blog MobyLives of being Eggers’s “hatchet man,” he hasn’t had a piece published by McSweeney’s in over two years, and the journal’s Web site long ago took down the link to his archive. It was nothing personal, Pollack says, merely an aesthetic split. While Eggers appears to have given up on entertaining the reader, Pollack’s work has only gotten funnier as he grows ever angrier at the general stupidity of American writing.
“I’m making fun of the critical stance that promotes purity above anything else,” Pollack says via e-mail. “That stance permeates contemporary literary culture with its stench. The corporate publisher promotes Jonathan Safran Foer as a ‘pure’ literary product. Jonathan Franzen is a ‘true’ writer. The Believer postulates that book reviews should be purged of ‘snark,’ meaning no jealousy and no bitterness, which are the dominant emotions of the literary life. On the other end, you have the Underground Literary Alliance, for whom the act of getting paid for writing is a betrayal of some undefined literary ‘revolution.’ I’ve got a lifetime of material arrayed before me, and it looks delicious.”
