In my neighborhood in Brooklyn, fathers are everywhere. They're moseying out of the dignified brownstones that line the streets; they're in the coffee shops downing lattes for strength; they're wiping drool from their infants' faces with faded college T-shirts. Is it possible that all 143,000 stay-at-home dads in America—the number tallied by the U.S. Census Bureau last year—live down the block from me? They amble past on their way to the park, pushing their Maclarens, and smile at me broadly: Hey, lady, we're in this together.

But what are those mysterious expressions flickering across their faces as they fasten the Velcro on their babies' spillproof bibs? Fatherhood has got to be a confusing gig these days. These men have had their sturdy briefcases yanked from them recently—the 50-50 dad, even the stay-at-home dad, may have emerged in the '70s, but the phenomenon has only lately come into being as an acceptable way of life, and I imagine it is causing a storm of mixed emotion.

Turns out, it is. Enough, at least, to prompt a few of these newfangled fathers to put pen to paper. At first, I couldn't think of a single book that offered a portrait of the 21st-century dad, a man who has outgrown his stereotype. But then I remembered The Bastard on the Couch, Daniel Jones's sulky 2004 response to The Bitch in the House, the anthology edited by his wife, Cathi Hanauer, and that—along with a quick search on Amazon—led me to discover that a modern fatherhood genre has been slowly developing in literature. Let's call it "dada-lit." (Or should we, as payback for "chick-lit," call it "dick-lit"?)

"We're expected to express our feelings, to take care of our children when our wives are working, to do the housework, to be patient while our kids puke over our shoulders," laments Fred Leebron, one of the Bastards, in his essay "I Am Man, Hear Me Bleat." "But what husband hasn't stood in the doorway of the typical scene of domestic tranquility (kids and wife sitting shoulder to shoulder, playing) and wondered—just how the hell do I fit into all this?" No matter how evolved he becomes, will Mr. Mom ever feel like more than a cross-dresser at home in an apron?

Elisha Cooper and Neal Pollack, the most recent entrants in the fatherhood-mined-for-memoir category, ponder this very question. In their respective books, Crawling: A Father's First Year and Alternadad, we learn what it is like to try to stand firm on this ever-shifting ground. These authors, both of whom spend a good portion of their day with their kids, strike completely different tones. Yet the two men express similar anxieties. Both bristle at the idea of becoming the stifled parent, the one who, according to Cooper, is no longer "driving to the mountains, having sex in the afternoon, playing sports whenever we want," or the one, as Pollack puts it, "whose interest in popular music, or not so popular music, died the day our first kid was born."

But these guys, pioneer at-homers that they are, are not the first to point out the complexities of dadism. In 1986, Bill Cosby published his best-seller Fatherhood, in which he identified the problem that has no name: "[A father's] role is simply to be there, sharing all the chores with his wife. Let her have the babies; but after that, try to share every job around. If the new American father feels bewildered, let him take comfort from the fact that whatever he does has a 50 percent chance of being right. Having five children has taught me a truth as cosmic as any that you can find on a mountain in Tibet: There are no absolutes in raising children."

Next Page: Dads don't need answers.