Neal Pollack's Sweet Deal

"What can I say?" Pollack chuckles. "It's sweet?it's a sweet-ass deal. I'm thrilled beyond belief."

It's a funny book, too. As the title bloat suggests, Pollack is satirizing that genre of pompous, self-congratulatorily "literary" journalism one sees in venues like The New York Times Magazine, Atlantic Monthly and New York Review of Books. He creates the persona of a world-traveling "adventure journalist," the type who goes out and becomes a rock climber, a drug dealer, a guerrilla, a surgeon?whatever it takes to get the inside story. There's a Photoshopped gallery of snapshots with Pollack doing a Zelig, appearing to have known JFK, Allen Ginsberg, been in Vietnam. Pollack is 30.

The essays have great titles like "The Albania of My Existence," "I Am Friends with a Working-Class Black Woman" and "Teenagers: The Enemy Within." A bogus acknowledgments page tells us that "'The Albania of My Existence' previously appeared in GQ as 'Sympathy for the Starving'; 'I Am Friends with a Working-Class Black Woman' previously appeared in The New York Times Magazine as 'Grumble in the Bronx'; 'It Is Easy to Take a Lover in Cuba' previously appeared in The Atlantic Monthly as 'The Buena Vista Anti-Social Club'... 'To Search for the Celtic Tiger' previously appeared in Rolling Stone as 'Nothing Compares 2 Ireland'; 'Teenagers: The Enemy Within' previously appeared in The Dallas Morning News as 'Possible Interest-Rate Hike Irks Investors'" and so on.

In "A Doctor Cannot Save Your Life," Pollack's straw man tells us:

"Suppose you're a doctor, like I am, at least temporarily. You are presented with a patient, a middle-aged man or woman with cancer of some sort. Your first aim is to get the patient to feel at ease. Your second, more difficult, aim is not to kill them. For instance, despite my extreme lack of experience, I am considered a cancer specialist in my hospital. Of course, I have no idea how chemotherapy functions, or how a mammogram is performed. Every time a patient comes in, I say, 'Ha. Ha. Looking good. Looking good. Let's get some X-rays taken.'" He goes on to inflate his own incompetence into a critique of the whole medical industry.

In "Teenagers: The Enemy Within," he goes undercover among the underage, and ends up in prison. "[O]n the suggestion of my editors at the New York Review of Books," he explains at the outset, "I recently undertook a project unlike any currently being attempted in American journalism. I investigated the secret world of teenagers.

"No topic receives less coverage in our media, which is so unfair. Teenagers are the adults of the future; when we're dead, they won't be. But because of our media's relentless bias against youth, we never see the lives of teenagers depicted. No articles have been written, no television shows produced, no movies released. Teenagers today could be utterly different than we were, or they could be amazingly similar. We don't know, because until now we haven't had the opportunity to know."

Thus conditioned, the reader is not surprised when "An Interview with My Sister, Who Is a Lesbian," turns out to be all about the author, not his sister:

"Everyone in my family is heterosexual, with the exception of my sister Sharon, who is a lesbian. What goes on in a lesbian's head, when she is alone, or with another lesbian? Who could know the answer but another outsider, a writer like myself? When we were growing up, it was always I who felt different, interesting but lonely, excluded from the family pack. It's not easy being a National Merit Scholar at age 18, much less at 15, or even 13, which I was. Even then, Sharon's giving lesbian heart was open to me, so when she came out to the family a few years ago, I was especially accepting."

Pollack is a staff writer at the weekly Chicago Reader, where he's written since 1993. He grew up in suburban Phoenix. "I'm living proof that an upper middle-class Jewish kid with a good education can make it in the world," he jokes. "I think that my story will serve as an inspiration for those who don't think they're going to make it out of Grosse Pointe or Shaker Heights."

Asked how he got involved with McSweeney's, he replies, "What happened was, Eggers sent out an e-mail. It was forwarded to me by someone else. So I wasn't even on Eggers' original list of writers he wanted to invite."

He sent Eggers a small batch of humor pieces, and Eggers ran them in the first McSweeney's. Since the website went up he's been a constant presence there. "At some point the pieces began to accumulate and people began saying to me that I should put a collection together." John Hodgman, who contributes to mcsweeneys.net as a "Former Professional Literary Agent," helped him put something together and "tried to shop the book around to various publishers that he knew," with little response. That's when Hodgman "suggested that I go to Dave and ask him to make this the first McSweeney's book."

Eggers' hand is very evident in the design and overall structure of the book. It's a classy clothbound hardback modeled on the Modern Library look, down to the ribbon marker hand-sewn into each book. (Which reminds me of another literary model for Pollack's effrontery: Max Beerbohm, the turn-of-the-century parodist, whose first book was also a brash collected works.) Does Pollack worry that people will think he's Eggers' puppet?

"I don't think so. I mean I wrote every word in the book, and it doesn't sound like him... I'm definitely not Dave's trained monkey. He doesn't tell me what to write or how to do it. I mean, we work together on things, but I think that's okay. I don't see why people shouldn't collaborate, if they have certain goals in mind. I definitely don't think I'm his puppet. If I were, he'd be putting his hands places he's not allowed to."

This brings us back to that sweet deal. The Eggers-Pollack business relationship is a marvel of simplicity?though possibly one only feasible if your publisher happens to be loaded, and up for tinkering with the traditional system. Eggers, flush with capital from the success of McSweeney's (selling 20,000 copies per issue, he says) and his own novel A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, fronted the $28,000 it cost to produce 10,000 copies of Pollack's book. He paid Pollack no advance, but from sales Eggers will recoup only the $2.80 it cost him to print each book. The book is priced at $16. From each copy sold online through mcsweeneys.net, Pollack will get the full net after expenses: call it $13 per copy. So, from those first 400 copies sold, he earned $5200. That's as much as or more than plenty of first-time literary authors see from an entire run. And there are 9600 more copies to sell. On bookstore sales, the store will take as much as half of the net, so Pollack will earn more like $5 per copy sold. Still, he's going to make a killing.

Asked why he's taking no cut of the proceeds for his trouble, Eggers says, "I would feel funny. All I did was loan him some money, really. I put the book through Quark, I spent some time helping shape the book, the order of the chapters, some line-editing. But I do that because I like doing it, and because Neal's the funniest writer in America?and an intimidating man who sometimes threatens me," he jokes. "The idea is that it's a joint venture between friends, in a way?more of a community thing. We're trying to shrink the gap between the work and the benefits of it, and the connection to it."

What a commie, I say to him.

"God, I sound like it, don't I?"

Much about the way the book was produced is an experiment in streamlining and speeding up a process that commercial publishing drags out into an endless bureaucratic mess. The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature took eight business days to print?at Oddi, McSweeney's printer in Iceland. (Why Iceland? "Initially it was almost a joke," Eggers tells me. "I did the first issue of McSweeney's there just to see if it would actually work. I met with this printer, the quote was good, so we gave them the first issue. And they ended up doing such an amazing job we had to stick with them.") The best estimate he got from a U.S. printer was nine weeks.

The book was quick, but it doesn't look cheap. "The more I got close to the process and realized how affordable it was to print hardcover books, the more realistic the jump was. I would be walking around a plant and pick up a hardcover and say, 'How much for this?' and 'How much for that?' and it was always a difference of about 12 cents. The difference between paperback, hardcover, cloth cover, ribbon markers?it was all reasonable and could be factored into the cover price.

"I think we're trained to think it's this elaborate process, this mysterious voodoo science that nobody could possibly learn unless they've been in the business for X amount of years. I have the utmost respect for those who know bookmaking in and out, but I think everyone, authors in particular, should know what the books cost to make, the different materials, how long it actually takes, etc. It helps an author in a lot ways to know these things."

Also, as soon as the book was back from the printer, it was ready for selling. Eggers predicts that the next one, Lawrence Krauser's Lemon?about a love affair between a man and his citrus?will be two or three weeks from manuscript delivery to sales. At commercial publishers, with their seasonal catalogs, it can be a year between the author delivering a manuscript and its hitting the stores?a year filled with a lot of what strikes Eggers as bureaucratic waste.

"[I]t's this game of postman," he says. "A writer will make an agreement with an editor. They both understand the book, and have an idea of its audience. But then they have to convince the 'sales force' of the value of the book. It's like starting over, completely. It's like if you were cooking dinner for your friends, but first asked a bunch of strangers what they thought your friends would like. The editors seem genuinely scared that the sales force won't understand the book and then won't push it. And if an editor can't 'get the sales force excited'?that phrase is used by everyone, and it becomes this weird Oompa Loompa mantra?then the book will languish...

"The catalog itself is like a two-and-half-month process. Everyone runs around, losing their mind to get everything ready for the catalog. But everyone knows ahead of time how many copies will be ordered. Everyone knows which books will be big and which won't. And if there are surprises, the surprises are never predicted. So the catalogs are superfluous. Everything should be on the Web, where publishers can react quicker, save money, and where stores can see what's available and order the books directly from the site."

On the other hand, this no-advance, all-royalties arrangement puts the burden on the author to get out there and sell his book. Pollack, working with one McSweeney's intern, has set up a grueling 23-city U.S./Canada book tour for himself. It starts in Boston on Sept. 5 and comes to New York for three events, Sept. 7-12.

"I like getting up onstage and amusing the people," Pollack tells me. "I've been getting e-mails from people all over the country saying that there's interest in the book. I have this one woman in Atlanta who's renting me a Mark Twain costume. I'm doing two nights as Mark Twain... Like a lot of people, I've always wanted to go on a rock tour. I don't think it's too lame that I'm doing this. I'm even having bands at some events." (Jon Langford of the Mekons played at the book's coming-out party in Chicago.)

"I don't know if I really had anything against big publishing when I started this project, because I was so far out of the realm of big publishing that it didn't matter what I thought," Pollack muses. "So it's not like I'm, you know, twice burned or something. But after doing it this way, I can't see how I could go back, or why. There's just so many levels of bullshit that are removed. I don't see why a writer can't take an active or even a primary role in marketing their work. I don't think it takes anything away from the integrity of their work...

"I think that whenever a culture industry gets too big for its britches?look what happened to movies in the mid to late 80s, or independent record companies around the same time. Those were reactions to conglomeratized culture. Wouldn't it be great to have an independent books movement that goes beyond the zine movement? That would be the best thing to come of all of this. I think McSweeney's has done this. It's exciting to be in the middle of it. It's a lot more fun than begging Bertelsmann for spare change."

Pollack gives a traditional reading at Galapagos in Williamsburg on Thursday, Sept. 7, at 7:30. Then things get odd. Monday, Sept. 11, at 4:20, he'll do one at the east entrance gate on Ellis Island. And Tuesday, Sept. 12, at "2:34 p.m.," he'll read at the Aquarium in Coney.