"Dan Gets a Minivan," by Dan Zevin The subtitle of "Dan Gets a Minivan" - "Life at the Intersection of Dude and Dad" - nicely encapsulates a genre that has provided rich fodder for former dudes like Bill Cosby ("Fatherhood"), Robert Wilder ("Daddy Needs a Drink") and Dave Barry (take your pick). It has also spawned a lucrative second career for the actor Paul Reiser ("Couplehood," "Babyhood," "Familyhood"). Add to that list Dan Zevin. A "comic correspondent" for NPR and a humor columnist, Zevin is on his fourth dude-in-­transition book, and "Dan Gets a Minivan" finds him in apparently full embrace of his new identity. For Zevin, the minivan is a symbol - not of conformity or the constraints of family, but of freedom. "Long ago, you see, my life was economy-­size," he writes. That old life, enjoyed with his wife in brownstone Brooklyn, was fun, sure. But with the addition of two kids and a dog, things changed. Space was needed. Trips to Costco had to be made. Enter the minivan. Zevin jumps in: "When life deals you a minivan, you might as well enjoy the ride." Joy, however, is not the central reading pleasure of "Dan Gets a Minivan." That would be witnessing Zevin's coming to terms with the misery that accompanied his journey toward enlightened adulthood. In one particularly absurdist essay, he gets a summons for letting his dog off-leash after he, clad in a "Gerry TrailTech Backpack Baby Carrier," has stumbled and dropped his cellphone in a pile of his dog's excrement. He fights the summons, forgoing a guilty plea and a $25 fine to plead not guilty and leave his fate to the court. In another he struggles to find a nanny, fails, and ends up a reasonably content stay-at-home dad and writer. He and his wife wrestle with forming relationships with other couples (a process he calls "co-mance"). He downgrades his primary goal in life from winning a Pulitzer to finding "a reclining chair for the living room." Though Zevin's voice is lively, all this woe gets a little tiresome and at times feels drawn out. Do we really need 22 pages on the dog-leash drama? The best chapters are the tightest. Take, for example, an address titled "Some Friendly Advice to the Aloof Hipster Dad at the Playground." Zevin's tone here is pleasant but hectoring. He tries to sell Hipster Dad on the pragmatic appeal of cargo shorts ("I've got 27 pairs of these things," he says, useful for carrying chalk, baby wipes and juice boxes) and of actually using the playground's swing set with his son. "I used to push from the back, but if you do it from the front, you can see their faces." He also promotes daddy solidarity: "You're gonna get hurt. They can beat us up, those mommies. They have anger issues. What do you mean, "With who?" With us! Zevin gets a lot of mileage out of his vague likeness to Dan Zanes, the king of indie children's music - someone he's actually been mistaken for (there's a photographic comparison). "It happened most recently when an attractive group of mommies came charging at me with their jogging strollers one day and remarked: "Oh. We thought you were someone else." " The confusion leads to perhaps the sweetest scene in the book, after Zevin decides to take guitar lessons in a "Parents Who Rock!" class. His family ends up singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight," and despite some giggles from his wife, he writes, the "kids loved every minute, and that's all that mattered." Though Zevin never gets closer to treacle than that, I wish these essays had more bite. This is well-trodden territory, and the writing could use more snarl. The book has apparently been optioned by Adam Sandler. That seems about right: funny, but, you know, not too funny. Dan Saltzstein is an editor for the Travel section of The Times.