Dan Gets a Minivan: Life at the Intersection of Dude and Dad

The latest in a slew of books on fatherhood, Zevin offers the latest installment of his ongoing memoirs about having to be an adult (The Day I Turned Uncool: Confessions of a Reluctant Grown-Up). In a book that lacks the humor of his previous books, Zevin seems unaware of how unbelievably smug he sounds as he recounts the travails of moving his wife and two children from a neighborhood of “impossibly cool Brooklyn families” to one of suburban bliss: “big yard, two-car garage, and a neighborhood playground.” This leads him to fill his memoir with vaguely updated observations on topics that were old when they first described life in 1950s suburbia: “Here’s what date night is... the goal is to stay awake in each other’s presence.” But he sometimes does have a way of making trivial and mundane insights into a deep spiritual experience that demands to be shared with others. In one chapter, Zevin finds himself berating an “Aloof Hipster Dad” to accept that the hip attitude doesn’t hide that “[y]ou’re just in over your head like the rest of us.” (May)