Alternadad: The True Story of One Family's Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America

Alternadad: The True Story of One Family's Struggle to Raise a Cool Kid in America

by Neil Pollack

Anchor, HK$120

The reviewer's first temptation is to create a new genre called, say, dad-lit and proclaim Neil Pollack as a pioneer. But that ignores the marketing ploys at work here and suggests this memoir of hip fatherhood had an immaculate conception and painless, pristine birth. If dad-lit exists, it's still gestating.

Alternadad probably has less to do with the birth of a genre than the death of a weary, older form. The market is flooded with motherhood guides. In step the savvy male author and his publisher's Department of Snappy Hooks.

Pollack is the switched-on author of fiction, magazine articles and blogs with a rock'n'roll attitude. He is the type who rarely leaves the suburbs - even on holiday - but insists on living in soulful areas that need a little love from an overeducated white guy. He should have been the man to reel in reading blokes with tales of delaying adolescence into fatherhood. But after 368 pages the lessons are few and the successes of life without compromise, apart from a publishing deal, are close to naught.

We follow Pollack from the marijuana-smoke haze of his youth to his marriage to artist Regina after answering her ad: 'Wayward Southern Belle seeks single gentleman with penchant for scatological humour'.