Reviewed:
The World Is What It Is: The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul by Patrick French
Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell
A Writer’s People: Ways of Looking and Feeling by V.S. Naipaul

Part Two: About the Author
Part Three: “A Life of Extraordinary Callousness”
Part Four: “I Went Out And Achieved Anyway”
Part Five: “Africa Has No Future”
Part Six: “Indians Defecate Everywhere”
Part Seven: “Autonomy, Complexity, Effort, And Reward”

Part One: “Ego and Circumstance”

My introduction to the professional world came near the end of summer 2007, when a former executive at RealNetworks – the company culpable for that awful video player that is now to computers what VHS is to TVs – happened upon me and offered me a job. It was dumb luck; I had posted my informal curriculum vitae to my high school’s Listserv in an attempt to woo tutoring clients. There weren’t enough, but I prided myself on having never held a real job before, so I e-mailed back: “what’s the compensation?” He responded: “Twenty dollars an hour.” I said “done,” and so it came to pass that, for the first time in my life, economics conquered principle; I woke up early to drive to Downtown Seattle and sit in the sterile office of an Internet start-up for forty hours a week.

The following spring, the journalist Lauren Collins came to lecture to a meeting of my magazine. She delivered her spiel to the prospective muckrakers: “just be ready to take anything that’s out there,” she said, and then there was a forgettable question-and-answer period. Afterward many said to me what I had thought: they had read her work; she was a good writer; but her demeanor was a little skittish, her advice obvious, her extemporaneous speaking awkward, the whole thing underwhelming. Some expressed pessimism for the dwindling journalistic job-market, but others said gnomically: if she could get a job, why can’t we?

All this might have been expected; Lauren Collins was, after all, 27. But while my friends graduated, took entry-level semi-menial jobs, and moved into housing projects with an eye of doing something that was both challenging and remunerative in maybe a decade, Collins was already a staff writer for the New Yorker.

There are tens of thousands of aspiring young journalists – thousands with similar or greater skill – who would kill for that job at that age. Lauren Collins’ backstory is unknown to me, but to write for “Talk of the Town” six years out of college must have taken not only this merit – the kind of merit thousands of other aspirants have – but also dogged determination and incredible, providential luck. In her case, the last two factors were clearly the determining ones; she was both lucky and good – good enough, at least.

Now, another New Yorker staff writer who is both lucky and good has written a book about similar success stories. Outliers is Malcolm Gladwell’s third book of pop social science, after The Tipping Point and Blink, and stylistically and structurally it follows the formula of his first two runaway successes: anecdotes, like the one above, alternate with analysis; each chapter concludes with a plainly stated and memorable take-home message that adds to both the smaller points Gladwell has made before, and the grander point that he is making.

Gladwell’s grander point – his thesis – is this: success is never due to merit, or merit alone; upbringing, travail, practical intelligence, culture, and even birth dates – what I’ll broadly term “circumstances” – is also of great importance. It seems obvious to someone like me: without a stable nuclear family, I might never have discovered my love of learning; without a stimulating public-school program full of similarly-minded people, I might never have cultivated this love; if the public-school program weren’t housed with a divergent program, I might never have learned to talk to people different than me; if the admissions officer at Columbia was going through a rough divorce, I might have gone elsewhere; if my employer had been browsing through his e-mail with less diligence, I might have worked somewhere else. Having been ill with dyspepsia and insomnia for the last calendar year, which has to a great extent – if temporarily – diluted my intellect, I see that everything I value about myself is contingent on my fortunes, as much as my talents; all of my prosperity and achievements teeter precariously atop flimsy scaffolding. I stopped writing recreationally for the better part of a semester, and I’ve found recapturing my erstwhile abilities to be a laborious and iterative process, one that’s impossible in full until I get better.

Failure, then, begets failure; success begets success. Opportunities lead to more opportunities, and soon those born equal to others but afforded better chances are actually better than their less fortunate brethren.

Employing a bit of formal terminology, Gladwell calls this phenomenon by its economic name: self-fulfilling prophesy. Many of the individuals that people his book are just this: extraordinary savants born into extraordinary contexts, who do extraordinary things. There is Bill Gates, whose parents are wealthy enough to send him to Seattle’s Lakeside, the West Coast’s finest private school, where he has providential propinquity to a computer; there is J. Robert Oppenheimer, who talks his way out of attempted murder and into the directorship of Los Alamos; there is the lesser-known Joe Flom, who was fortunate enough to be rejected from leading law firms just when corporations were beginning to take their most lucrative business elsewhere.

So these are the successes, the outliers, and on the basis of their effort other successes have been made: had there been no Gates, there would have been no software boom in Seattle, no RealNetworks, no high-paying summer job for me (and there were hundreds of college students better qualified for that position than I was.) The other half of Outliers, seamlessly woven in with the rest, details the failures: people of extraordinary talent and mediocre circumstances, whose potential has been either channeled less constructively or outright frustrated. The most memorable vignette is that of Chris Langan.

He has an IQ of 200 – that is, he is to Einstein as Einstein is to an average American; he can memorize and connect at will; his sentences come “marching out one after another, polished and crisp like soldiers on a parade ground”; he is, in his intellectual potential, an outlier.

“But so what?” Gladwell asks. For Chris Langan is a sort of Herbert Stempel figure, a real-life Will Hunting: he has accomplished nothing. Stempel worked a low-level public service job in Queens before the Quiz Show imbroglio; afterwards, he held the same job, unable to parlay his brief exposure to NBC’s bigwigs into any sort of upward social mobility; in spite of his high IQ and his freakish memory, he couldn’t transcend his circumstances. Likewise, Langan came from nothing: a broken home, a move to Montana, a failed attempt at college in Portland and Bozeman; this precipitated a move to Long Island, where he endured the daily drudge as a bouncer not twenty miles from Herbert Stempel.

Chris Langan is an extreme example, but Gladwell suggests that our society is one shot through, overwhelmingly, with people like him: there are myriad potential outliers, yet few are born in the right place at the right time. It is this conclusion that makes Outliers his most polemical and bravest work to date: he asks his huge readership not just to change the way they think, but the way they act.

Next time: what kind of outlier is V.S. Naipaul?