HOW TO BE NORMAL

Erudite riffs on race, religion, masculinity, and other contentious subjects.

The title of Christman’s second book is facetious. "Normal,” he knows, is both unrealistic and pretty much nonexistent at the individual level, a point that’s clearer now that Covid-19 has wildly disrupted “our little attempts that we make at building a home in this world.” However, the title of this collection of informed, inviting essays hints at a common theme: A more stable society requires challenging the pieties and presumptions we bring to touchy subjects. It’s no easy task, and Christman acknowledges his own struggles. In “How To Be a Man,” he skewers acculturated masculinity’s “abstract rage to protect” as sexist and borderline racist, but he concedes how his own actions have implicated him. In the strongest, most nuanced piece, “How To Be White,” the author voices skepticism about anti-racist jargon (which often leads to what he calls “shit-eating allyism”) and exposes the false premises of Whiteness while recognizing how toxic the “labyrinth” of racism is. Christman delivers his scholarship with a certain humility, but he gives no ground when it comes to injustice, and he's often witty. Recalling evangelical hand-wringing about alleged Satanic backward messages on rock albums, he quips, “If you wish to be offended, from any number of perspectives…by Zeppelin, that’s easy enough to manage with the record playing forward.” Navigating difficult social challenges, he argues, requires eschewing absolutism and cultivating a certain ambivalence. Religion is more meaningful, he writes, when you stop thinking about God as a “personal mood improver”; marriage matters not because of high-flown vows but “because you have met a person interesting enough that, death being inevitable, you’d prefer to experience it with them.”

A crisp set of essays that bring big social and cultural debates to a human level.