It’s a Saturday afternoon, my wife’s out of town, and both of my daughters are napping after a busy morning at the zoo. The dishwasher’s humming, the dining room table is clean. For a brief, golden moment, I finally feel like I’ve got this fatherhood thing down cold.

So I put my feet up on the couch, turn on some music and read about how author Michael Chabon thinks he’s a complete failure as a father.

Of course, by any measurable yardstick, Chabon is a devoted father to his four kids — caring, wise, attentive, encouraging them to explore their worlds with confidence. But in his essay “The Losers’ Club,” which opens his new collection “Manhood for Amateurs,” he deftly and humourously digs at the shaky emotional architecture underlying even the most self-assured of parents.

For every perfect day with your kids, there’s always that moment when you got frustrated and impatient, or simply didn’t give them the full attention they needed at a key moment. “Success ... does nothing to diminish the knowledge that failure stalks everything you do,” Chabon writes.

Chabon, whose literary fiction has taken him to some fanciful extremes in novels like “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” and “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union,” proves himself equally adept at the earthbound and mundane in this collection of personal essays.

He includes a beautiful piece on how, in this age of pre-arranged playdates, kids just don’t go outside and play anymore. But as he makes some sharp observations about how risk-averse modern parents are, he’s ruefully aware that it sounds like the “in my day things were better” screed that parents have indulged in since Adam and Eve had to move to a new neighborhood.

One of my favorites is an essay on the evolution of Legos, in which Chabon bemoans how modern Lego kits are basically glorified models of “Star Wars” and “Transformers” toys, rather than the brightly-colored free-play blocks of Chabon’s childhood. But Chabon’s hand-wringing is undercut by his kids, who take the pieces from the different Lego kits and “remix” them together into a glorious plastic mash-up.

Most of the essays originated as columns Chabon wrote for Details magazine, and as wonderful as most of the pieces are, some of them suffer from that certain glibness that only comes from writing on deadline.

But then Chabon finishes off with his best essay, a wonderful piece about his daughter’s bat mitzvah that takes all the usual middle-aged sentiments about one generation passing off to the next, about confronting your own impending mortality, and kicks them to the curb. Instead, as the guests dance, carrying his daughter above them on a chair as is the Jewish custom, Chabon opts for a full-throated paean to the joys and urgencies of celebrating the individual moments of life.

“I looked up at her — grinning and beautiful and terrified and happy — and felt not the same old ‘time is fleeting and we are all mortal,’ but something finer, and simpler, and harder even to bear in mind,” Chabon writes. “This is our life happening, I told her, or would have told her if I could have caught my breath long enough to say it over the clamor of the clarinet and fiddle. And it’s happening right now.”

Sated with that wisdom as I laze self-satisfied on the couch, it takes me a few seconds to recognize that the high-pitched noise I’ve been half-hearing isn’t coming from the dishwasher in the kitchen. It’s my 2-year-old daughter, bleating indignantly that she’s been awake for several minutes and hasn’t been properly attended to.

One more failure. Or, taken another way, another moment for parent and child that’s happening right now. With a half-happy sigh, I get up to go scoop her into my arms, and see what comes next.

Manhood for Amateurs

By Michael Chabon

Harper

320 pages, $26

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