Neal Pollack

Now that Neal Pollack is past the indignity of being widely suspected to be Dave Eggers’s pseudonym, he’s been able to get down to the business of being his own pseudonym. As fans of his 2002 Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature and his consistently funny weblog know, in “Neal Pollack,” the real Pollack has engineered a pitch-perfect parodic voice–a pompous, wildly egocentric buffoon of celebrity journalism. He wields that voice like an oaken club of comedy in his debut novel, Never Mind the Pollacks—a rolling-thunder revue through rock history like Forrest Gump with Hunter S. Thompson as the main character. The novel runs out of steam well before it runs out of pages, one problem being that music mytholology becomes more depressing and less fun the more you move from Elvis to Kurt Cobain. That said, Never Mind contains some terrifically funny stuff, especially the mystical old bluesman Clambone Jefferson. (If you’re one of those crazy types who likes listening to rock as well as reading about it, know that the Neal Pollack Invasion has released a CD and plays at the 400 Bar October 20.)