Malcolm Gladwell Runs Out of Tricks!

His latest book David and Goliath just gives us more of what we've come to expect

Published in the December 2013 issue

One day not too long ago, Malcolm Gladwell defended himself. He'd been accused of promoting claptrap in the form of the "10,000 hour rule," the primary subject of his book Outliers. He posted a response on The New Yorker's Web site that included this sentence: "There's a reason the Beatles didn't give us 'The White Album' when they were teen-agers."

Well, yes. Before the Beatles could give us The White Album, they had to achieve disorienting success. They had to take a lot of drugs. They had to learn to hate one another. They had to experience the centrifugal energies of the '60s. They had to live. What we infer from what Gladwell wrote, however, is that they had to practice, and were able to make The White Album once they passed the 10,000-hour threshold.

It is a notion both obvious and preposterous, one that could be taken seriously only by Tiger Moms and other anxious exponents of the meritocracy. It is also utterly characteristic of its author. Gladwell has been treading the line between the obvious and the preposterous for years, yet instead of being dismissed out of hand, he has become the most influential journalist of his generation, a village explainer embraced as a kind of philosopher. His success is not accidental; his success, indeed, is grounded in the fact that he has made success his subject and has learned from his heroes. In all of Gladwell's books, people succeed when they master a skill that seems inconsequential but turns necessary. The skill that Gladwell has mastered is the inevitable act of misdirection that has become his signature:

The Gladwell Feint.

The Gladwell Feint is Malcolm Gladwell's 100-mph heater — we know it's coming, and there's still nothing we can do about it. In all of his books and in all of his stories, there is a moment when he questions the obvious…obviously. He tells us we have it wrong…and we know we have it right. He surprises us … and his surprise fulfills our expectations. He makes us anxious that we don't know something…only to assure us that we've known it all along. He flatters us by seeming to challenge us, and then makes the terms of the challenge so simple that we can't help but feel smart when we get it "right."

Gladwell is not the only writer to write explanatory journalism calibrated to flatter the sensibilities of his readership — so does David Brooks and, to a lesser extent, Michael Lewis. But Gladwell does it almost exclusively. In his most recent book, David and Goliath (Little, Brown, $29), he writes about "the power of the underdog," telling story after story that amounts to some variation of the children's-book staple: And that little boy grew up to be… King David! But that's not the Gladwell Feint. The Gladwell Feint in David and Goliath is that the book is not really about underdogs at all but rather highly successful people who can teach us something about success. Gladwell might be suspect as a philosopher, but his credentials as the Horatio Alger of late-period capitalism are unsurpassed. He does not get up to 80 grand a speech because he makes his audiences feel bad about themselves. He gets that kind of money because in seeming to demystify the meritocracy, he makes his audiences feel both assured about their own standing and anxious enough to go home and make their kids practice, practice, practice.

He's supposed to be a nice guy. He says that he never wants to write a negative story, and he has applied the Gladwell Feint to counterintuitive causes like pit bulls and three-strikes laws. He is best when he is worst — when he strays from his thesis and allows himself to be merely good-hearted. But there is a noir thriller to be written about a kid whose mother reads Outliers and forces him to practice the violin for 10,000 hours. He comes looking for Gladwell.

It's not to play him a sonata.