How to Be Human
Christman’s new collection is humorous, vulnerable, and impressive in equal measure.
Review by Hayden Kvamme
In How to be Normal, Phil Christman tackles some of the topics that threaten to tear America apart: gender, race, culture, faith, and family, to name a few. The result is a series of essays humorous, vulnerable, and impressive in equal measure. Perhaps above all, though, the book succeeds by daring the reader to engage these issues seriously without closing herself off to the possibility of being surprised or even delighted in ways she least expected.
How does Christman accomplish this? For one thing, the persuasive power of the book works beneath the surface. Christman has little interest in making sure you agree with him (though, don’t get me wrong, he’d be glad if you did). With their suggestive, playful tone rooted in anecdote and reflection, the essays elude straightforward analysis. The effect is to invite the reader to come alongside the author, as if sharing an afternoon coffee on a break, rather than sitting nervously alone at a desk, pen in hand, waiting for him to slip up. It’s not that Christman makes any attempt to hide his leftist take—he doesn’t. His perspective, though, doesn’t hinder his openness.
While the essays can stand alone, there is a flow to the sequence. Each essay explores stereotypes and generalizations from all sides of the ideological spectrum juxtaposed with Christman’s personal experiences and reflections. Each time, some kind of tension develops between them. Yet it’s not that he finds his life or that of his associates exceptional. Quite the opposite—and that seems to be the point. In the first essay, for instance, on masculinity, Christman freely admits his male privilege and agrees with the point his coworker intends to make when she says, “As a man, you never think about how much space you take up.” Yet he goes on to relate humorous experiences from his own life that demonstrate, as he says to the reader, that “the wording of the statement is so literally false in my case.” Whether at the gym, in the workplace, or on social media, Christman is constantly fretting about the space he takes up. Even here, his tone lacks any stench of defensiveness, so that even a skeptical reader is beckoned on. All of this opens the door to his deeper analysis, which culminates in an exchange he has with his wife, who finally calls him on upholding some, in her words, “hierarchical bullshit.” Christman quips, “I cannot quite accept the emotional consequences of this, but I know she is right.” A similar tone is struck in the essays on whiteness, bad movies, middlebrow, and faith that follow.
Christman’s voice is marked by a genuine, successful effort at “solidarity with regular people”
For all its reach, though, the work inevitably has a few blind spots. In the essay on whiteness, for instance, full endorsements of popular anti-racist works are few and far between, for good reasons which Christman explores well. Nevertheless, this can leave the reader a bit squirmy, wondering what Christman makes of, say, The New Jim Crow or The Color of Law (neither of which make an appearance). Readers could likely cite similar examples in other essays. For Christman, though, one can imagine these criticisms becoming genuine conversation starters. These are certainly the places where I’d want to begin once the coffee was poured. And that’s just it: one gets the feeling Christman would take the time to sit down for the chat with grace and honesty.
In one of the later essays of the book, Christman focuses on Mark Fisher. Reflecting on Fisher’s engagement with the likes of “Lyotard, Lacan, and Deleuze,” Christman concludes that Fisher’s books that deal heavily with these figures don’t feel heavy or difficult: perhaps Fisher’s greatest talent was his ability to talk about these thinkers in a way that made their ideas practical and useful. These writers generally strike me as obscurantist to the point of dishonesty; I have never trusted them, and yet there is something in Fisher’s authorial voice that makes me trust him. Reading him is like taking a brisk walk with your smartest friend.
Christman’s authorial voice makes a similar impact. Like Fisher’s, Christman’s voice is marked by a genuine, successful effort at “solidarity with regular people.” This isn’t just a neat trick, or great writing, but approaches what seems to be the heart of the matter for Christman. As he writes at the end of the introduction, “Our only home is each other.” The rest of the book, like an improv soloist, takes that premise and runs with it in a myriad of directions, gaining depth as it goes.
In Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son, love between father and son looms large. (So it is for Christman, whose own father’s love shaped him in profound ways.) Yet, like the first hearers of the parable, so the reader of How to be Normal stands in the place not of the younger son but of the older: on the edge, perhaps unsure of whether to join the celebration. The trouble, of course, is that at the table are all kinds: tax collectors, sinners, elites, zealots, anti-maskers, zoomers, and everyone in between. Sitting at the table, Christman’s invitation isn’t so much to normalcy as to humanity. You might not always agree with the person sitting across from you, let alone Christman himself. But as the pages turn, Christman isn’t asking for your ear; instead, he is lending his own, open to surprise and possibility. He’s lending it not just to you, but to your estranged father, or crazy aunt, or that coworker you can’t stand. We might as well sit down and see how it goes.
Hayden Kvamme is an associate pastor at Gloria Dei Lutheran Church in Rochester, Minnesota, where he shares in all aspects of pastoral ministry. A math major at Dartmouth, Hayden graduated from Wartburg Seminary in Dubuque, IA, where he wrote his thesis, The Character of the Justified Sinner: A Christological Account of the Formative Power of Worship in conversation with James K. A. Smith’s Cultural Liturgies series.
How to Be Normal was published by Belt Publishing on February 1, 2022. Fare Forward appreciates their provision of a review copy. You can purchase your own copy on their website here.
