Only a Boy named David

Pity Poor Malcolm Gladwell.

Imagine you were a rather good journalist, who could write stories about people and events which were worth reading.  Interesting stories in which a fine ear for a telling anecdote helps illustrate a larger point.  Imagine you are making a decent career doing that.  Imagine you have worked your way up to writing for The New Yorker.  (The New Yorker! That is a magazine Easterners of High Class all read.  Californians?  Well, I never understood why a magazine pretending New York was the Center of the Universe made sense.  But, even still, if you are writing for The New Yorker you have arrived.  If you can make it there…)   Then suddenly, you have an idea: some of the sorts of stories you are telling can be linked together to tell an even larger story.  So, you write a book—a real book, not just a magazine article—which is roughly a collection of magazine-article-like things but united by this common theme, see, and thus it is a book—a real book—and so you get royalties and fame and go on talk shows, like, you know, an expert.  It is the journalist high.  So you do that.  Twice.  You publish The Tipping Point and Blink and you are famous and getting those Royalty Checks and you are on TV and people like you, they really, really like you.  You are famous!  And everyone loves your books.

So you do it again.  You write Outliers. And some people love it—you are famous, see, you get $45,000 for giving a speech, see, so you must write good books, right?  But, other people start noting something.  The book doesn’t really hang together as a book.  The seams are showing.  It reads more like a set of stories in which you are pretending there is a common theme.  The critics even make it into your Wikipedia entry: “The New Republic called the final chapter of Outliers, ‘impervious to all forms of critical thinking’ and said that Gladwell believes ‘a perfect anecdote proves a fatuous rule.’”  That hurts. 

So you go back to the drawing board and you publish a book which really is just a collection of your articles.  You don’t pretend otherwise.  Nobody even knows that book exists.  

So you go back to the well one more time, and you publish David and Goliath. 

Sigh.  I read that book.  And I sighed.  (See—the Sigh is right there three sentences ago.) 

The subtitle of David and Goliath is Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.  The essay on David is cute—while we think of David as an underdog, truth be told, if you were in ancient times and you were betting on a mano a mano between Behemoth and Slingshot Artist, you would want to put your money on the guy who can kill the other one from a  distance.  It’s a lot like a battle between a guy with a gun and a guy with a large sword.  Yeah, you saw that movie too.  (If you didn’t, see here.)  It was funny, laugh out loud funny because at first you think Indy is doomed, but then he pulls out a gun and you realize that the joke is that of course he would win.  David and Indiana Jones are the same guy.  Like I said, cute story—though Gladwell really should have made that Indiana Jones comparison.

So, a book about underdogs!  Americans love underdogs!  Americans love Gladwell—see those royalty checks!  So Americans will buy this book! And they did!  And…it’s not very good.  

Don’t get me wrong, the individual chapters are all good—if they were in a magazine I was reading, I’d like them.  (Then again, since I don’t read The New Yorker, I would be unlikely to see them.)  Gladwell does write well and he does have that ear for a good anecdote.  But, put all these articles together and pretend that the combination makes some larger point?  Uh…hardly.  If you tried to draw a large cohesive lesson from this book, you end up in a mess really fast.  I tried.  Briefly.  I gave up as soon as I tried to connect two chapters and realized that no matter which two chapters I picked, the larger story was inherently contradictory.  There is no larger story here.  There are some good individual chapters. 

Gladwell is an article writer, not a book writer.  But all the money is in books.  So, he will undoubtedly keep trying.  And the book market being what it is, it will be interesting to see how long before everyone notices that this here Emperor has No Clothes.   If you want to pay $45,000 to hear Gladwell give a talk, be my guest.  He probably even gives a really good talk.  But the strange part—the reason he gets these large checks is that everyone assumes he is writing books on a common theme, but he is really publishing collections of magazine articles.  And people who publish collections of magazine articles aren’t nearly as famous.

So, this is why you should pity Malcolm Gladwell.  Well, pity him as he is on the way to the bank cashing his checks…but that is beside the point.  Pity him.  Sooner or later, the game may end.  In the meantime, you should enjoy his books—just don’t be fooled into thinking that there is a larger point than is contained in the individual chapters.