A few weeks ago, a friend and fellow journalist gave me a talking to over the phone. I was stuck on a structural point in the book I am writing, and as I grappled with possible solutions while ignoring all the advice I’d asked her for, her patience wore thin. “Stop trying to be Malcolm Gladwell,” she finally told me. Then, for effect, she repeated herself, stressing the point in a wireless version of a finger wag. “You’re not Malcolm Gladwell.”
What struck me most about this exchange was not the bluntness of the advice–at this point I have the mid-career professional’s relatively impervious hide–but the underlying assumption. Malcolm Gladwell? Where had that come from? As far as I knew, I had never tried to write like Malcolm Gladwell. I like his work, but I am not one of those writers who pores over every new Gladwell piece in The New Yorker to decode the secrets of his genius. I do not sit around, like some other writers I know, and try to channel him when I start a magazine story in hopes that I might turn that very piece into an international bestseller with an understated but immediately recognizable black and white cover.
There are many reasons why I do not occupy my time in this way, but the most important one is this: I am too busy obsessing over Michael Lewis’ work. If my friend had told me to stop trying to be Michael Lewis, I would have been much more hurt and much more defensive because then she would have been right. In the dead of night, when I wake up trying to figure out why a particular section or passage or even sentence is doa, I ask myself this question: What would Michael Lewis do?
Jim Clark may be a royal pain in the ass to everyone he encounters, but the empathy Lewis creates keeps him from being one to the reader.
Of course, I do not know Michael Lewis, so I have no idea what he would really do. I blithered like a bombed bobby-soxer the one time I actually managed to meet him, therefore missing any sage advice he might have had for me. Lewis is, for me, the writer’s equivalent of a child’s imaginary friend, except that in my imagination he isn’t exactly friendly and, alas, I am not a child. Fantasy Michael Lewis is the person who always gets a source talking on the first try, who never has trouble facing the blank page or the blinking cursor, and who never makes the kind of dunderheaded mistake that encourages someone to put in a call to their lawyer. He doesn’t need to make revisions because his work flows effortlessly from his mind to the page. Editors barely pick up a pencil because the finished work is flawless.
Fantasy Michael Lewis also likes to remind me that the real Michael Lewis is wealthy and successful in a way I can only dream of, because he, unlike me, has written innumerable instant bestsellers that have, naturally, been turned into major motion pictures that have, yes, been nominated for and won Oscars for the people lucky enough to be involved with them. (See: Moneyball and The Blind Side; Lewis is currently working on the screenplay for his first book, Liar’s Poker.) Fantasy Michael Lewis is, in short, the embodiment of all the demented notions that I allow to run wild every time I have a deadline looming. This experience is common among writers. I suspect my friend spends a lot of time listening to Fantasy Malcolm Gladwell prattle on and on about the tiresome renovations of his summer house in the Hamptons.
Anyway. In recent years, the real Michael Lewis has been attacked, as mega-successful writers often are, for committing various sins, including journalistic laziness, falling much too in love with his subjects, being insensitive to the Holocaust, and–probably one of the worst sins in American life–misunderstanding the history of the major leagues in Moneyball. It seemed like a reasonable time, then, to return to my favorite Lewis book, The New New Thing, to see whether my love was still true.
In other words, mired in a book of my own, I thought I might turn to Fantasy Michael Lewis to help me out.
The New New Thing holds up just fine. It came out in October 1999, before the collapse of the dot-com bubble. The book’s subtitle is A Silicon Valley Story, and if you haven’t read it, you should know that Lewis did not produce a long, ponderous, extensively footnoted history about the epicenter of the tech world. Nor did he include helium-laced quotes from the founders of Oracle and Microsoft and a zillion or so other guys. Instead, he found one guy through which he could tell the story of that incomprehensible time in American life: Jim Clark, then the compelling, already insanely rich founder of Netscape, the once famous Web browser that, not so surprisingly, no longer exists. These days, an author’s ability to find just the right person to explain whatever global phenomenon he or she wants to explain has become a journalistic cliché; 15 years ago, when Lewis used that device to show how the tech boom would change the world, it was a novelty.
These days, an author’s ability to find just the right person to explain whatever phenomenon he wants to explain has become a journalistic cliché. When Lewis did it 15 years ago, it was a novelty.
In order to write the book, he essentially moved in with Clark and his long-suffering, now third ex-wife, Nancy Rutter, in order to chronicle the former’s twin obsessions: building the world’s largest and completely computerized sailboat, and remaking the rules of US capitalism in his own chaotic image. I can only imagine how Lewis must have felt when he found, or decided to focus on, Clark, a man whose wealth, intelligence, and paranoia, combined with what seems to be a confounding case of adhd, had irresistible and nearly unlimited literary potential. I’m pretty sure, too, that Lewis’ decision to cross the Atlantic with Clark on his oversized high-tech sailboat created some ambivalence in his editor, something along the lines of, Great story!–we’ll have a bestseller as long as you don’t die on the crossing.
Fortunately, Lewis didn’t die, and instead produced a short, relentlessly funny book that also manages to be a near perfect account of a particularly nutty time in American life, a period when it seemed like everyone was going to get insanely rich if they could just figure out what something called the internet was for. All these years later, The New New Thing is just as much fun to read retrospectively as a great history of a period that did, in fact, change the life of virtually every person on the planet. It’s all there–the entrepreneurs, the engineers, the geeks, the venture capitalists, and more, groping toward a future that everyone now takes for granted.
Lewis captures this moment in just 268 pages–one reason the book was featured so prominently in airport bookstores. Imagine discovering a very good looking, very witty, and very smart person seated next to you in coach class; Michael Lewis in book form is just that kind of companion. One minute your chin is being assaulted by the seatback in front of you, and then next you are immersed in chapter one, visualizing the mast of Clark’s multimillion-dollar yacht teeter-tottering on the North Sea’s 15-foot waves–as it happens, a pretty good metaphor for what would happen to the rest of us once Jim Clark had his way.
Lewis’ rich, carefully observed portrait of Clark is the heart of the book, and it still serves as a great example for any writer–even a mid-career professional–intent on bringing a subject alive on the page. He doesn’t start out by giving the reader a short Clark biography or résumé–your standard second section or chapter two that begins with a scene at the hero’s childhood home along with the date of his birth. Instead, Lewis plunges the reader immediately into Clark’s world, producing the same disorienting effect his subject had on everyone. Sure, Lewis gives a nod to Clark’s enormous wealth–he was a billionaire at a time when there weren’t as many of them crowding the Forbes list–but Lewis also manages to provide a window into his self-made subject’s tangled psyche.
Like a lot of very rich men, Clark plowed his money into vehicles: “helicopter, stunt plane, motorbike, various exotic sports cars . . . and, of course, the computerized sailboat,” Lewis notes. A lot of journalists would come up with such an enviable list–it’s unavoidable, given what most of us are paid these days–but Lewis manages to make more of what he sees than the average writer: “No matter how reckless [Clark’s] mode of travel might appear, he never considered himself anything less than the soul of caution. No, for him all the joy came from mechanical intimacy. Machines! He loved to know about them, to operate them, to master them, to fix them when they were broken. More than anything he liked to upgrade and improve them. I came to believe they were the creatures in the world to whom he felt closest. They were certainly the only ones he really trusted.”
Tom Wolfe may have an incomparable gimlet eye for his characters’ need to elevate themselves with the likes of Turnbull & Asser shirts, but Lewis manages to move from outside to inside with affection and understanding. In other words, Jim Clark may be a royal pain in the ass to everyone he encounters, but the empathy Lewis creates keeps him from being one to the reader.
The invention of an internet browser and the creation of a healthcare portal (you remember, an entrance onto the information superhighway) are two of the book’s major plot lines. Both serve as prime examples–as opposed to idealized myths–of the true messiness of innovation. Lewis shows the wacky trial and error needed to invent the machinery of the Web. Vast fortunes were won and lost, and more than a little mental illness ensued, while people attempted to use the TV as the hardware. He’s also very good on the smoke-and-mirrors shows that turned initially cautious venture capitalists into a stampeding herd. Perception was just as important in Silicon Valley as it is in any American high school.
There’s a great section in the book in which Clark desperately tries to convince some traditional engineers of the potential for computer graphics, the ability to use software–created by Clark–to design on the computer in three dimensions. The resistance to this product, as with many new products, was immense. A lot of people, Lewis notes, “thought it was a useless toy.” Clark was dismissed by the likes of ibm and Hewlett-Packard. When an engineer from Lockheed saw an onscreen demonstration of a car being designed and redesigned in 3D, he allowed as how it was fine for cars but not for the airplanes he designed. “He didn’t understand that Clark’s new company [Silicon Graphics] made it possible to design everything inside a computer,” Lewis notes. “And that every new Lockheed airplane from now until eternity would be created by Silicon Graphics’ technology.”
Lewis, of course, has gone on to write more books and have even more success, and probably has a bigger summer house than Malcolm Gladwell, though it’s hard to know for sure.
Then there is the way Lewis handles the homework, the slices of obligatory background information that in the hands of lesser writers could become… stultifying. Some of this information, of course, wouldn’t seem obligatory to every reporter: Lewis’ brief history of Holland’s revered Royal Huisman Shipyard–necessary to explain Clark’s choice of a sailboat builder on the other side of the world–is not just hilarious but, as stated above, a clever introduction to the book’s central theme, the collision between longstanding traditions and the increasingly mechanized world that will inevitably destroy them. A good many Pulitzer-hungry journalists would have used the presence of so many Indian engineers in Silicon Valley to produce a ponderous treatise on globalization, and it probably would have worked. Lewis squashes that phenomenon into a couple of concise, highly entertaining pages and leaves it at that. (How much more, really, do you need to know?)
He gives the same treatment to Clark’s near forgotten hometown of Plainview, TX, to his explication of old-fashioned bankers vs. newfangled bankers, and to the early history of Silicon Valley. “At some point in the early 1990s the engineers had figured out that they didn’t need to build new computers to get rich,” Lewis writes. “They just had to cook up new things for the computers to do. The thrill was in the concepts; the concepts were the recipes.” This information may sound like old news now–kind of–but at the time the description perfectly encapsulated the invisible, electric energy that was Clark’s world, and it was information readers couldn’t get from the pages of Businessweek, Fortune, or Forbes, largely because most of their reporters didn’t understand what was happening much better than the general public.
One reason The New New Thing is so authoritative is that Lewis learned about the shifting world of business and economics firsthand–he described his sentimental education on Wall Street in the 1980s in his first book, Liar’s Poker. (Salomon Brothers’ CEO John Gutfreund may be nearly forgotten, but Lewis’ coinage of the term “Big Swinging Dick” has not been, probably because so many men will always find the term flattering.) As the author of a book on the rise and fall of Enron, I speak from personal experience when I say that it’s helpful to have some background in your subject before you plunge in. I know this isn’t true of all writers with experience in their fields, but that knowledge can be helpful when you are trying to make an extremely complicated subject not just comprehensible but actually fun to read. Lewis also has a great light touch; as much as I love the work of Matt Taibbi, the former doesn’t have to call an investment bank “a great vampire squid . . . relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” to make his points, and he is more credible for his restraint.
In fact, on a second read, The New New Thing stands as an elegant exercise in the art of understatement. The very best example of this comes in the book’s penultimate chapter, in which Lewis notes the presence of a tuba in Clark’s home. By then we think we know everything about Clark–how he puckers when he’s angry, that he’s relentlessly competitive about nearly everything, that finishing anything is, for him, a death sentence–but we don’t ever know exactly why until Lewis explains the presence of that tuba in Clark’s home, just a few pages from the end of the book. I don’t want to spoil the ending here, but the tuba serves as a profoundly powerful reminder of the poverty–emotional and financial–of Clark’s early years. It’s a brilliant bit of armchair psychologizing on Lewis’ part, and saving it for the end has now struck me in two readings as a terrific, gutsy piece of craftsmanship. Rosebud II, almost.
After I reread the book, I Googled Jim Clark, something I could not have done when The New New Thing came out. So many technogeniuses have come after him–Eric Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, etc.–and so many things have happened, including 9/11, the wars in the Middle East, Hurricane Katrina, the global financial crisis, and so on, that Clark and even the tech boom are now a footnote in the digital world we all blithely inhabit. Clark himself has since invested in a variety of enterprises, given away a lot of money (not surprisingly, he’s also taken some back), and remarried for a fourth time, to an Australian model named Kristy Hinze, who is 36 years younger than his 70 years. (Nancy Rutter walked away with $125 million.) Clark’s daughter, Kathy, is fittingly married to a co-founder of YouTube.
Lewis, of course, has gone on to write more books and have even more success, and probably has an even bigger summer house than Malcolm Gladwell, though it’s hard to know for sure. And The New New Thing still works as a primer for me. For its humor, its style, its cogence, and its timeless picture of the entrepreneurial mind. Most important, I remain in awe of Lewis’ ability to tackle a serious subject without taking any of it too seriously.
As it turns out, so is Malcolm Gladwell. “I read Lewis for the same reasons I watch Tiger Woods,” he told The New York Times in 2013. “I’ll never play like that.” Then again, maybe that’s just his imagination.
Mimi Swartz is an executive editor at Texas Monthly and is currently working on a book about heart disease