On Mon, 27 Feb 2006, Doug Henwood wrote:
>> Malcolm Gladwell
>
> Why is this guy so popular? He seems like a hack and a bit of a turd to
> me.
I can see why you might get that impression based on his books (Tipping Point and Blink) and the hype surrounding them. But I think it's possible to see the books as the exception. IMHO the guy writes enjoyable and interesting essays. Like this one in a recent New Yorker:
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060206fa_fact
It's not earth-shattering, but IMHO it comes to a very satisfying conclusion in the last few paragraphs that feels so satisying precisely because of the meandering, essaistic style with which it gets there. And this isn't his best essay. It's just his most recent.
Essays don't get to the bottom of things so much as stir them up gracefully and intelligently. They get you thinking, and they make it more enjoyable than usual through variety, by the trick of developing several themes simultaneously, and then getting them to converge in surprising ways. It's more a musical than a logical organization.
The problem however, for a serious thinker like you or me, is that I think there is an absolute size limit for this sort of writing before it collapses on itself, and it's about the size of a long New Yorker essay. But if you want to make a lot of money -- and what writer doesn't? -- you have to somehow make it a book.
But his short books are too long for this musical structure to work. And this forces him to wreck them in a second way. Now he has to come up with a clear monotonous theme that all the separate subjects have in common. Which not only wrecks the whole emergent fun of it, but is necessarily thin. Because only a very empty, formal theme can connect topics of such variety.
But if you skip the books and just stick to the essays -- and read them as essays, as things to pass the time on the toilet or in the subway or on a plane -- I think you might enjoy them (if you enjoy essays at all). And his personality might look different to you too. The business world might hold him up as an oracle but he seems to present himself (and it seems to me honestly) as absolutely the opposite of that, as just an essaist, in the old sense, as one who essays, who tries, and often gets it wrong. But who never claimed to be more than an amateur probing.
So as to why he's popular, I think there are two separate explanations. One is that New Yorker readers are overjoyed because his essays mark a return to this tradition of long fugal essays that almost everyone was afraid had vanished with Tina Brown. There are other great essaists in the New Yorker these days -- Louis Menand, Adam Gopnick when he's on -- but none of the regulars are so essaistically meandering as him. And New Yorker fans are really happy to have this kind of writing back. It's a graceful vacation from the news into a deeper level of reflection that isn't however so deep that you get anxious or tired out. It's refreshing. It's what they came for. And it's something they thought was lost.
And the second, pretty much entirely separate, component of his popularity is that those silly books have been latched onto for their silliest features by the business community's after-dinner-speaker crowd for the same reason they latch onto anything: it makes them feel intelligent and current with very little work. The books are tiny and easy to read, they look like they touch on everything. And once something becomes a business fad, everyone's gotta buy it and cite it.
But I don't blame the guy for wanting to make a living.
Michael