Pranks

Will the real Neal Pollack please stand up?

by Chris Wright

WHO IS THIS MAN? A recent newspaper column assigned Neal Pollack the status of non-person. But don't believe everything you read in the papers.

Having interviewed the humorist and McSweeney's contributor Neal Pollack in these pages a couple of weeks ago (see "A Writer's Journey," News and Features, September 22), I was rather disconcerted to read a report posted on Jim Romenesko's MediaNews (www.poynter.org/medianews) suggesting that Neal Pollack does not actually exist.

The rumor got started in the San Diego Union-Tribune, in an item on Pollack's book The Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature. "Neal Pollack just might be the greatest writer who ever lived," wrote Union-Tribune staffer James Herbert, "if not for the inconvenient fact that he has never, technically speaking, actually lived."

Huh?

Pollack, Herbert continued, is merely the alter ego of McSweeney's editor and literary wunderkind Dave Eggers. Though he offered scant evidence to back up his claim -- a piece on Pollack in Men's Journal, for instance, had featured an intro "by a guy named . . . Dave Eggers" -- I was concerned. After all, Eggers is notorious for pulling stunts like this.

But I had met Pollack. I had sat across a table from him. He had a little mustache. I had bought him a Coke. Had Eggers really orchestrated all this? Had he found someone willing to masquerade as the writer who wrote the book that Eggers himself had actually written? More to the point, had I been had?

I gave the man I'd known as Neal Pollack a call.

No answer.

I e-mailed Dave Eggers.

No response.

I phoned Diane, the McSweeney's PR person.

Nothing.

I e-mailed and phoned, phoned and e-mailed. No luck. No luck. No luck. As the week wore on, I became convinced that I had been the victim of a prank. I felt like a schmuck.

Finally, I got through to the man who started all this, the Union-Tribune's James Herbert.

Turns out that Herbert, aware of the McSweeney's crowd's reputation for playing tricks on the media, had mistakenly conjectured that Neal Pollack was another elaborate stunt. His bosses at the Union-Tribune were cross with him, he said: "It was a dumb gaffe on my part." And so, without lifting a finger, Dave Eggers has stuck it to us yet again.

If there's a moral to this story, it's this: maybe we really shouldn't believe everything we read in the papers, even if what we read in the papers is an item telling us that we shouldn't believe everything we read in the papers.