The minivan was the easy part. Dan Zevin, hipster parent and professional humorist, seemed not to worry all that much about violating Cool Rules when it came to trading in his little car for a boxy, bourgeois kid-hauler. In his younger days he needed room for only three people in his car: "Me, Me, and Me." Now he is happy to embrace the vehicle, even if riding around in it signals to all the world that he, his wife and his two children are decidedly not one of those "cool Brooklyn families who have no use for any vehicle that's not yellow with a meter on the dashboard." Much harder is the question of whether to remain in Brooklyn at all.
Before getting to that question, "Dan Gets a Minivan" spoofs the absurdities and frustrations of urban life, especially as it is lived in New York. There may not be enough police around to obviate the need for iron bars on your townhouse windows, Mr. Zevin notes, but park illegally and within minutes you'll be slapped with a $250 ticket. One morning, he is walking his dog (on a leash) in his neighborhood park and in his best responsible-owner fashion crouches with a plastic baggy to clean up after the pooch. It is at that moment that the dog spots a squirrel and, with his owner off-balance, breaks free to chase it. Within seconds a humorless officer of the law appears and cites Mr. Zevin for violating the park's leash law. Off the writer goes to court, an experience one part Kafka and two parts Henny Youngman.
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Dan Gets a Minivan
By Dan Zevin
(Scribner, 217 pages, $24)
Alas, too many of the set pieces feel forced, with Mr. Zevin flogging away at mundane situations and unremarkable events. And as modestly amusing as some of the anecdotes are, much of the shtick in "Dan Gets a Minivan" comes with a whiff of mothballs. The basic conceit of the book—young dad comes to terms with driving a minivan and all that it symbolizes—was done, and done well, long ago. See Andrew Ferguson's "Me Tarzan, You Minivan" (Time magazine, 1997). Mr. Zevin makes fun of the sort of "Aloof Hipster Dad" in Brooklyn who dresses his kids in a "Sex Pistols T-shirt and Velcro-strap Converse All Stars." See Adam Sternbergh's anthropological investigation into the sort of hipster dad in Brooklyn who makes "his 2-year-old wear a Misfits T-shirt" (New York magazine, 2006).
At times, the humor isn't just old but tired. We are told that, at Costco, products come in mondo-bulk packages, such as the "Janitor in a Drum jugs large enough to be taken literally." (Who knew?) Mr. Zevin is astonished that the cranberries that New Englanders eat at Thanksgiving are not "a cylinder of Jell-O-like 'sauce.' " He describes his first trip abroad: "The closest I'd ever come to world travel was the International House of Pancakes"—which was a lame gag back at the Republican National Convention in 1992, when Pat Buchanan described breakfast at IHOP as the full extent of Bill Clinton's foreign-policy experience.
Or consider when a Catholic college asks Mr. Zevin to give a commencement speech. He is nonplussed, until his agent tells him, "They want you." Mr. Zevin writes that, "for a second there, it sounded like he said, 'They want Jew.' Which would actually explain a lot." That joke was fresh in 1977, when Woody Allen walked down the street in "Annie Hall" complaining that an anti-Semite had said to him, "Didchoo eat?": "Not 'Did you eat,' but 'Jew eat?' " Mr. Allen rants. "Get it?" We got it 35 years ago.
Light comedy can be heavy lifting, which is why one roots for Mr. Zevin when he applies his comedic talents to social observation, in particular to the limits of urban hip and its precious tastes. Seeing a Brooklyn neighbor "walking down Smith Street in those white Fred Perry tennis shoes with the green wreath logo on the side," he assumes that the man plays tennis and so invites him to play a match. But tennis, it turns out, has nothing to do with the shoes. Mr. Zevin soon notices "the majority of my neighborhood promenading around in the exact same footwear, not because they were into tennis, but because they were into sneaker worship, the predominant religious practice in Brooklyn."
Mr. Zevin hits his stride in lampooning the Brooklyn crowd of which he is a member, where everyone "is incredibly friendly and interesting and a free-lance graphic designer." His neighborhood is gentrifying, meaning that "the ratio of bail bond offices to organic, free-range ice cream shops . . . is now about 1:3." The hipsters with kids strain to convince themselves that "the city has everything a family could want." But Mr. Zevin begins to doubt that this assumption is really true after spending a summer in the suburbs, where his kids have a grassy green lawn with butterflies to chase and a tree to climb. Mr. Zevin is at his likable best when he realizes that schools and space may matter more than being in a neighborhood with cool bars and "artisanal, Rain-forest Alliance-certified, cruelty-free pizza."
And so finally, after wasting too much time on comedy pyrite, Mr. Zevin grapples with the question: Is it worth sacrificing his urban tastes for the sake of his children's welfare? On one shoulder is the Brooklyn neighbor who sneers at the "cesspool of suburban lethargy." On the other is a refugee from the city he meets at a Westchester backyard barbecue, who observes: "We spent the first few years trying to fit the kids into our lives, so now it's our turn to fit into theirs." So which will it be? "Dan Gets a Minivan" may be a lumbering jokemobile, but the theme stowed inside is serious enough that one actually cares how Mr. Zevin answers the question.
Mr. Felten writes the Journal's Postmodern Times column.
A version of this article appeared June 4, 2012, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Here Comes Suburbia.
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