The 'Stranger Problem' - Malcolm Gladwell tries too hard to write a Malcolm Gladwell book.

Some books draw you with a catchy title. Some, through a piece of topical content you spot in the preface. And there are others that attract themselves to you because of the author’s name, who you are a fan of.

“Talking to strangers” sold itself to me for all the above reasons. As a sales lifer whose day job calls for compulsory communication with people, mostly strangers, I liked the title on the cover. Next, browsing through the content, I spotted an entire chapter dedicated to Harry Marcopolus, calling him the ‘Holy fool’, something I instantly loved ( anybody who loves GE and has been following the business press in recent months, would know why). The third reason of course was Malcolm Gladwell himself, who has literally invented this whole new genre of pop non-fiction that deals with one big idea narrated through anecdotal references, historical as well as contemporary, and stories that intersect each other and add up into a coherent whole.

In ‘The Tipping Point’ (2002) , Gladwell explored how ideas, trends, preferences or catastrophes slip past the threshold and go viral. Mind it, these were the pre-social media days, and viral was still a medical and not a social phenomenon yet. It made for a fascinating read, to say the least. In ‘Blink’ (2005), Gladwell explained the science of thinking without thinking, establishing among other things, why love at first sight, conceptually endearing as it might be, is largely a delusion. Main-streaming some cool concepts ( the Warren Harding Error being one of my favorites), Gladwell put forth that human decision making is not a deliberate and gradual math of data crunching in the brain , but an instantaneous shuffling of accumulated experience. In other words, our intellect is pre-selected and kicks alive when our brains spot something and matches it with its databank of references. In 2008, Gladwell surpassed his first two books, both in terms of reach in readership as well as his expanse of content, with ‘Outliers’, his best till date, which was simply paraphrased as a The book about success , drawing protoplasm from ideas as diverse as why the centuries old Chinese rice farming heritage accounts for the mathematical acumen of Chinese kids today, to the heart breaking story of Chris Langan, perhaps the man with the highest recorded IQ in history, but who never saw material success because he didn’t have the right support structure. If you have not read ‘Outliers’ yet, I urge you to do so. It is brilliant. After ‘Outliers’, Gladwell followed up with ‘What the dog saw’, a collection of his published essays in the New Yorker, some of which were pretty drab while few were good. Gladwell’s ambitious 2013 book, ‘David and Goliath’, was mediocre, to say it kindly . In this book which attempted to chronicle how underdogs succeed, Gladwell, for the first time, seemed desperate . In other words, he was trying to disguise himself to look like himself . The result was sloppy and boring.

In ‘Talking to strangers’, Malcolm Gladwell elaborates the Stranger Problem , as he calls it, and narrates why liars might appear truthful , how double spies can fool you and seem loyal, and why body language could be the most misleading way to make sense of people. While he cleverly hooks you with a catch line, ‘what you should know about people you don’t know’, this book had an idea that had immense promise in its premise, given the communication vacuum the world today is grappling with, thanks to an explosion of (mostly irrelevant ) communication channels, Gladwell tries hard to reclaim his past form, but succeeds only partially . This is largely due to the stories he borrows to make his point that seem disjointed or forcibly inserted and coaxed to fall in line with the central idea , but which they mostly don’t. Yes, some of the anecdotes are good reads in isolation, but they do not contribute to the promise of the title.

The book opens with the story of Sandra Bland, a happy young black woman who is apprehended and mistreated by a white policeman and who later commits suicide in her cell. Using this as the theme that disturbs him, Gladwell embarks upon his narrative that swings from the Hitler-Chamberlain meetings ( & how Chamberlain failed to read Hitler’s intentions) to Fidel Castro’s spies and how they fooled America’s most premier intelligence agencies, from Jerry Sandusky, a college football coach and abuser of children ( or, was he ?) to an eccentric ( almost cartoonishly paranoid) Marcopolus who brings down Bernie Madoff or Amanda Knowx, an American student who spent four years in Italian custody because her American candor was mistaken for promiscuousness with lack of remorse and hence pronounced as guilt. Among other counter opinions that seem to be installed for sensationalism rather than to carry the concept forward, Gladwell , in a rare demonstration of mid-life crisis, rambles on and on about explicit sexual content – on child abuse, date rape and so on. For example, he debates rather ridiculously that a rape that happens under the influence of alcohol ( alcohol induced myopia, is his phrase) , might not be classified as rape after all. If these references were cursorily touched upon as props to help his story telling , it could still have been okay, but Gladwell goes on for pages together, giving us graphic visuals, almost like a B-movie forcing elaborate sex and violence in the narrative to pull in front benchers. He also has a chapter on Sylvia Plath ( one of my personal favorite poets ) and her descent into depression & suicide at the age of thirty, where he explains in his quintessential Gladwell style why suicide might be subject to coupling of circumstances and means in one place, and how, by decoupling them, suicides rates can be brought down. Then, he has a chapter on what he calls the Friends illusion where he uses the popular TV series as an example to tell us that real life is not like Friends where you can understand the episode even when your TV is on mute, thanks to the explicitly matching expressions of the actors to what they are supposed to feel . In real life however, Gladwell argues, people rarely wear their feelings on their faces, and that’s why a random algorithm might do a better job at analyzing a criminal than a seasoned judge who looks the defendant in the eye and who decides wrongly with overdone emotional intelligence.

Like I mentioned before, in his latest book, Malcolm Gladwell does make a comeback of sorts, and buries the ghost of ‘David and Goliath’, but he is still a far throw from his early work. Read this book for some of the ideas that stand on their own and for Gladwell’s engaging story telling style in parts. Do not expect to solve your personal Stranger problem by reading this book because the book itself doesn’t. At best, it reads like the work of a once-genius author who is giving his best to crawl out of a writer’s block & who has to pretend to appear profound . I give it two stars on five.

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My Sunday Blogpost - 22/09/19

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