Book review: What the Dog Saw

Published on Friday 23 October 2009 16:49

WHAT THE DOG SAW Malcolm Gladwell Allen Lane, £20 JANET MASLIN

AT THE beginning of 2000, The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell was published. Gladwell had a deductive style and a teacherly simplicity that would make him one of the new century's most frequently quoted writers of non-fiction. He went on to write Blink and Outliers, and all three books topped best-seller lists.

While he wrote these books, Gladwell continued to write features for The New Yorker. And those articles – some of which have been collected in his new book, What The Dog Saw – had a distinctive format. He liked to begin by framing some kind of broad question. Then he liked to change subjects abruptly. Let's suddenly talk about Ben Fountain and Jonathan Safran Foer. They are two writers who had no apparent common ground when Gladwell contrasted their stories in an essay called Late Bloomers. Fountain had taken a long time to become a writer and had made 30 research trips to Haiti in the process. Foer had made one trip to Ukraine and written his first draft for a brilliant book, Everything Is Illuminated, at the age of 19.

The essay's general point was that we know more about early success than about the kind that comes late in life. Its more startling and original idea – and it is vital to Gladwell's success that he can reliably produce at least one such lightning bolt per discussion – was that the success of the late bloomer, like Fountain, is dependent on the help of others.

The effect of Late Bloomers has been quantifiable, which is good, because Gladwell has a penchant for quantifiable data. People who bought Fountain's short story collection on Amazon.com have also bought Everything is Illuminated. Why? They must have made the otherwise inexplicable Fountain-Foer connection on Gladwell's recommendation.

This evidence of a Gladwell effect helps to predict something larger: that Gladwell's new book will be as successful as his first three. That would seem obvious. For one thing, all four books have similar-looking covers. All are written in the same style. But there is an important difference: What The Dog Saw is a collection of published articles. Are they too similar? Or, because Gladwell favours either/or constructions, are they instead reassuringly familiar? A book that repackages well-read articles by a well-known writer might sound unexciting, but that changes if the paradigm is something other than publishing. If this were a music album the collection would not feel recycled. It would feel sure-fire. It would be Gladwell's Greatest Hits.

But there are times when his affinity for a world of tidy, well-defined categories can undermine his reasoning. The Art Of Failure, a study of the difference between choking up and panicking, defines choking as a loss of what one knows implicitly and panicking as a loss of learned information. A desire to write about the plane crash that killed John F Kennedy Jr is what generated this roundabout article. But is it not possible to forget both kinds of knowledge in a moment of mortal fear?

What The Dog Saw does not invite this kind of scrutiny. What it does invite is marvelling at the scientific method that led Gladwell to replicate the Kennedy flight, dropping 3,000ft per minute in a plane. This book's voice always sounds level-headed, whether describing ketchup tasting or pit bulls attacking a boy. It tames visceral events by approaching them scientifically. Neither author nor reader has to break sweat.

This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 25 October 2009