The end of Neal Pollack’s Alternadad ends on a note that says something, I think, about why the whole alterna/grup/hipster parenting thing– which we’ve been dissecting at MAID this past week — bothers some people so much.
By this point Pollack and his wife have hit a kind of wall. They’re broke. They’re stressed about finding the right school for their son Elijah. They’re worried about raising him in their somewhat dangerous neighborhood. They’re trying to sell their house so that they can pay off their credit card debt but it’s not selling. Mostly they’re just worn down, and they’re battling the despair that comes when you first start to realize that life isn’t necessarily going to be the avalanche of joy, excitement and achievement you once believed it would. Pollack writes:
I wished I could give Elijah more, could be more for him. I just wanted the best for my family, and I felt ashamed that I couldn’t give it to them.
Of course, I still wanted other things as well. My ambition still burned, my dreams still lived. And those dreams pointed me in a specific direction. Maybe our house hadn’t sold for a reason. Maybe Austin wouldn’t be our home forever. In fact, I decided for certain that it would not. Soon my family’s life would be free of crime and danger and sleaze. Money problems would plague us no more. Only one place could provide us the transcendent happiness, not to mention the riches, for which we longed. When we got home that night, I said, “I think we should move to Los Angeles.
“Definitely,” she said.
A few pages later, at the very very tippy toe end of the book, Neal drops the news on Elijah.
“Hey, buddy,” I said to Elijah, after we stopped jumping, “Guess what?”
“What?”
“We’re moving to Los Angees.”
“Los Angeles? All of us? Even the kitty-cats?”
“Of course the kitty-cats are coming,” Regina said. “And we’re doing to get a new dog, too.”
I hadn’t heard about this “new dog” plan before, but I tabled it for later. Perhaps, I thought, I’d offer Regina a deal. We could get a dog if the cats went to live with her mother. Hell, as far as I was concerned, we could get a rabid monkey if the cats went to live with her mother.
“There’s a beach in Los Angeles and palm trees,” Elijah said. “And a jungle and a forest and big dinosaurs!”
“Sure.”
“And there’s gonna be Sea World in our house. With sharks that bite cows!”
“It’s always possible.”
“What we going to do in Los Angeles, Daddy?”
I told him what I hoped would soon be true: “Whatever the hell we want to, son.”
The key here is not Pollack’s ode to the utopia that awaits them in L.A., which is delivered with the appropriate degree of irony, but rather the more earnestly delivered last line — "whatever the hell we want to, son."
It’s that final refusal at the end to accept that life has to be normal, has to be conventional, has to be bounded, that has made Pollack and the trend that he supposedly embodies so noxious to some people.
Or it’s not just that; it’s that he advertises the refusal (or has ended up standing in for the people who do; more on that in a minute). It’s that his life — with its cool T-shirts, cool jobs, cool kids, cool art, hip music — is a walking implication to the rest of us that while we’re living our lives of complication, compromise, limitiations and sacrifice, there are these golden people out there who aren’t constrained by convention or expectation like we are. They don’t have to give things up, and they don’t ever have to come to terms with the distance between their actual lives and the fantasy lives they once projected for themselves in the future.
In the old days, at least, the bohemians didn’t have the good jobs and the good families and the nice houses. They were free, and they had more fun than the squares, but they were also too poor or too unreliable to enjoy the bourgeois satisfactions. Now, though, it seems like they not only get to have it all, they have time and money left over to find and buy $24 onesies for their babies that have Muhammad Ali silkscreened onto them.
Alternadad is, in fact, much more complicated than that caricature (as are the lives, of course, of even the most perfect-seeming hipster parents). If you actually read the book as opposed to just the publicity material, you come away from it feeling like Pollack and his wife aren’t these disgustingly lucky and happy people at all. They seem decent and humble, actually, and beset by the same difficulties that most middle-class families are. And yet the book’s got the hip title, and the iconic cover image with a rubber duckie with a nose-ring. The sub-banner at Pollack’s website reads, with some but not quite enough irony, "The Continuing Adventures Of An American Family In Hipster Parenting Paradise." And Pollack, thoughtful though he is, also isn’t entirely free of the ultimate California/American/consumerist/individualistic delusion — "whatever the hell we want to, son."
It’s being marketed precisely to cash in on this hipster parenting trend/buzz, a trend pushed on us by the media-industrial complex for the same reason that most trends are pushed on us — to make us worry that we’re missing out on the good life so that we’ll buy the things that, we’re implicitly promised, will make us perfectly happy.
As a writer who will soon have a child to support, I don’t begrudge Pollack (much) for letting the publisher have his way with the book’s marketing, but I do think that the book was easier to co-opt to that end, to some extent, because when Pollack wrote it he hadn’t yet clarified to himself what it meant to be an alternaparent. He hadn’t quite separated out the dressing — the clothes, the music, the affectations — from the substance. And there is, I believe, substance. But more on that later.
