Literature Has a Stay-at-Home-Dad Problem

A decade ago, when I became a stay-at-home dad, I was too busy sanitizing baby bottles and washing reusable diapers to read a short story, let alone an entire novel. Now I have a pair of night-owl elementary schoolers, and although bedtime can still be draining, I at least have the energy to enjoy a few chapters once they’re asleep. So when I learned last year about two well-reviewed novels featuring stay-at-home-dad protagonists—Something Rotten, by Andrew Lipstein, and The River Is Waiting, by Wally Lamb—I was curious to pick them up. Within the first few pages, however, I was disappointed to find that these characters were essentially a collection of the same old incompetent-dad tropes: unemployable, emasculated, blundering, or, in the case of Lamb’s book, tragically negligent.