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• Sheila Liming | Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time by Sheila Liming, Melville House, 256 pages. $27.99.

There may be no experience better suited to reminding us of the importance of friendship than moving across the country during a pandemic. That's what Sheila Liming did when she joined the Division of Communication & Creative Media at Champlain College. The experience informed her latest book, Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, which is part memoir, part research project and part manifesto on the importance of spending casual, unproductive time with other people.

In her two previous books, Liming established herself as a writer and academic who thinks deeply about spaces, both physical and abstract, and how they shape human perceptions, ambitions and social interactions. Office investigated how working in an office has changed over time, while What a Library Means to a Woman: Edith Wharton & the Will to Collect Books explored book collecting as a way to build a sense of self and a persona. Hanging Out is an obvious continuation of that work, divided into chapters that corral the massive array of human sociability into distinct sites and categories, such as "Hanging Out on the Job" and "Dinner Parties as Hanging Out."

These chapters often defy expectations. Beginning to read "Hanging Out on TV," I expected an analysis of the depiction of parties and social groups on the small screen, as in sitcoms. Instead, Liming writes about her own experiences being on TV when her friend became a Food Network star and started filming staged gatherings for a reality show, creating a simulacrum of her actual life and friendships. Liming chronicles how the women's real-life friendship faded in the light of their efforts to portray it on-screen.

This is just one of many interesting anecdotes Liming uses to demonstrate her theories. In these pages we find her working at an ultra-remote bar, taking backpacking trips and climbing a glacier.

Other chapters discuss the dark side of hanging out — the dangers of meeting predatory men at academic conferences or getting drunk with perfect strangers. But my favorite chapter is a celebratory one: "Jamming as Hanging Out," Liming's love letter to musical jam sessions.

A longtime player and teacher of the accordion, tin whistle and bagpipes, Liming played in multiple bands while living in Pittsburgh. Jamming feels like a topic that she's been waiting years to rhapsodize about in print, and her enthusiasm for it is contagious. Sure, she acknowledges "the guy downstairs" — anyone who feels inconvenienced or annoyed by the presence of loud music where they believe it should not be. But this does little to quell the force of her ode to jamming.

Liming suggests that hanging out might serve as a form of resistance to hustle culture, with its constant pressure to rack up concrete achievements. Writing about starting a band in winter 2009, in the midst of the Great Recession, she offers a mission statement that feels deeply relevant to life in 2023. "We felt ourselves to be living in a sort of generational ditch that no amount of talent or success could break us out of," she writes, "so we concentrated on having fun together, instead."

Hence the jam, or the experience of casual, improvisational music making, which serves "to hold a space open for the exploration of that kind of chaotic convergence, to listen and see if the things that feel at first like mistakes might, in the end, light the way toward new opportunities."

While Liming does champion traditional forms of sociability, she is not some idealized social butterfly determined to Emily Post us all into the perfect soirée attendees. She writes of parties that sound exhausting, of dinner-party guests who still owe her money, and even of attending a party and realizing that the host didn't like her. Given that she's never had an account on Facebook, where invitations are now frequently delivered, she notes that there have been plenty of parties she wasn't invited to in the first place.

But despite her Facebook stance, Liming isn't anti-internet; she is, like many writers, active on Twitter. In a chapter on the internet, she acknowledges that online interaction provides a safe space to socialize and a sense of control over one's surroundings that can be difficult to find in the modern world, and that those advantages were especially vital during the pandemic lockdowns. But she also argues that there's a form of euphoria people can't achieve online — one that comes from spending time outside one's comfort zone, sharing challenges and handling conflict with others.

Hanging Out is rife with references to works of literature and film — which makes sense, given that Liming has a PhD in literary and cultural studies. While she draws on a wide variety of writers and influences, I still found myself skimming those sections, eager to return to her storytelling about her own experiences. I also wished that she had included more of the voices of her friends and colleagues, who teach her about various ways of hanging out and whose perspectives might have felt more lively than textual analysis.

In the end, Liming suggests, a reclamation of hanging out will include a reclamation of time away from labor, of public spaces dedicated to contented loitering, and of the awkwardness and adaptation that come with constantly bumping up against other human lives.

In the book's conclusion, for example, she describes getting into an argument with a friend in a bar. It would've been easier, she writes, for either of them to give up on the conversation, leave the bar and avoid the discomfort. Instead, they dedicated hours to working through the disagreement and ended up finding common ground, strengthening their relationship in the process. Drawing on experiences like that one, Liming's book melds anecdote and analysis to uphold hanging out as a messy and vital tradition.