There is an early gesture toward methods. Dumm acknowledges a distinction between proof as “an illustration of form” and a “showing to be true” (p. 7). The former is a proof through exemplification; the latter, an effort to fix a definite meaning through placement. It should come as no surprise that Dumm embraces illustration and example and, in doing so, tries to preserve the ordinary with an approach traceable to classical philosophy. The book that follows this method is a presentation of the forms of ordinary life, an inventory of events, anecdotes, narratives, film, and fiction, in general a set of portraits that represents the private, common, personal stuff that we recognize as ordinary life. For Dumm this tentative and spontaneous life world expresses and mediates politics “understood as a capacity and a yearning” (p. 5).

Theory, understood as an explicit attention to the rival forms of understanding, explanation, argument, rules of evidence, and inference used to explain human experience, is no part of this book. Instead we have a collection of insights that draws upon the actual texts at hand and elsewhere to provide smart observations on unexpected connections and meanings. Dumm confesses that he finds theorists such as Habermas and Rawls, and debates about items such as liberalism and communitarianism, of little use as inspiration, in helping us to breathe, preferring instead the leads found in popular culture. The result is a book that reads like a collection of film reviews, biting, funny, enlightening in concrete ways, and leaving us with a wish to have a beer and a conversation with the author.

But so much is missing and missed in a work like this. Saul Bellow once said that he could not bear to read “The Adventures of Augie March” because he saw too many missed opportunities. Here are some opportunities and distinctions that fly away when Dumm puts pen to paper (or fingers on the computer keyboard). First, Dumm often writes as if the ordinary is in some earth chamber under siege, sealed off from flights of speculation and conjecture. But there is no required hostility between ordinary life and the larger forces of hegemony, codification, and controlling power that Dumm sets against the ordinary as both concept and event. The most ordinary event in the world is the slide from event to abstraction, from the quotidian to the generalizable account, from ambiguity to provisional certainty. The child's repetitive Why? question, as ordinary as any item in human experience, leads to infinite regresses and halting games at wonderful levels of pure abstraction, a domain of the ordinary that can easily examine (and dismember) the heavy theories of mass thinking. Remember that the search for timeless, permanent, transcendent truths is the most commonplace occurrence in history. Some of the best political arguments are street discussions of justice and the public good. Or, the counterplots of the ordinary have their own benign origins in the ordinary. Only a very few hints of these curious mergers are found in Dumm's presentations of ordinary life. Explore them and demarcations between the ordinary and its various antitheses may vanish.

Second, much of contemporary social theory is indeed turgid, unreadable and unthinkable, and (I would add) intellectually dishonest. But current failures of thought and expression are not indictments of abstract thought. They are just poor instances of theory. Good theory is usually elegant and beautiful. Read again Watson and Crick on discovering the double helix as the form of DNA. Third, without some work in theory, explorations even of the ordinary have as little use as last year's film reviews. There are rewarding ways to employ theory and avoid the ghastly trappings of bad social theory. Look at Roy Rappaport's magisterial Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity (1999), a work that combines rigorous anthropological research into types of ordinary life with analytic philosophy, to the benefit of both.

The oddest thing about Dumm's book is that he follows the lead of most sociologists today in rendering experiences from the outside, never discussing their internal meanings or truths, and Dumm himself seems always in a state of readiness to identify patterns and symbols that actors and authors almost never intend or recognize. For example, he presents the film Independence Day as a “reflection on the crisis of American national politics that is precipitated by the decline in confidence in our system of representation generally…” (p. 146). The 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Dumm asserts, “was directed at Jimmy Carter” (p. 152). The Exorcist is “a Watergate scandal film” (p. 153). And so on, with one thick imposed connection following another in a book that celebrates the ordinary.

One of my colleagues once asked the director Stephen Frears what he meant by the high shot of the action at a crucial point in the film My Beautiful Launderette. Frears said that on the day of the shot another crew had left a crane on the set so, what the hell, let's use it, and the famous scene was shot. Accidental to the core. Conceded, the author's intentions are not privileged in understanding a text, and if something is there it doesn't matter a lot whether or why the author put it there. The question is whether any bridge theory is privileged in accounts of the ordinary. I finished reading Dumm's book the day after the director in charge of Eastenders, the most popular program on English television, spoke to my London seminar. In response to questions about symbolic space he said what I have heard so often: that kind of stuff is the business of the literary critics. What I do, he said, is just present popular culture: wise, because, as Dumm recognizes, the ordinary is indeterminant at its center, which is one source of its life blood. But then one cannot just do bad and misleading literary theory, imposing patterns from the outside in place of fieldwork into ordinary life and the popular culture in which it is represented.

In the last chapter (“Wild Things”) Dumm raises the question at the center of an intersection between the practical sides of ordinary life and philosophy: Why exist? He is right that contemporary theory is not much help in negotiating this primordial inquiry. But then consider Dumm as guide on the welcome contingency of language: “It requires a particular valorization of ordinary experiences, an attempt to emphasize the powers of experience while avoiding the temptation to make experience into a force for normalizing the ordinary” (p. 168). Thank you, but I prefer the less trendy languages of good anthropology and the insights that sound research can provide on ordinary life.