Malcolm Gladwell is one of the few journalists who can claim to have had a phrase coined in his honour. He has spawned a new way of looking at the world – or at least at book publishing. I ask him what he thinks of the term "Gladwellian" when we meet in lower Manhattan. Is he proud of the flattery, or embarrassed by it? "I don't think it's true," he replies firmly. "I don't think there's such a thing. I don't think what I do is worthy of its own name."
He might say that, but in the boardrooms of publishing houses in New York and London, editors regularly deploy the phrase. As in (spoken with faint hysteria in voice): "Will someone please tell me where our next Gladwellian book is coming from?"
He continues to protest: "I've never thought I was doing anything unusual; it's just intellectual non-fiction, and that's been around as long as non-fiction."
We are drinking coffee at Morandi, a homely trattoria in Waverly Place. When we were exchanging emails about our rendezvous, Gladwell told me that he does much of his writing in this restaurant, adding in explanation: "I am a public writer." That seems a peculiar phrase, but when I quiz him about it, he says he only meant that he writes in public places. He rides around on a bicycle with his laptop, setting up office in cafes and restaurants around lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. That too puzzles me, because his friends say he is a deeply private person, verging on the introverted. So why hang out in public like that?
"It's not because I'm engaged in conversation with people," he explains. "It's because I spent 10 years in a newsroom and I can no longer write when it's quiet. I like people around me; but I don't want to talk to them."
Germaine Greer recently derided the current vogue for Big Ideas titles that Gladwell, above all, has inspired, as the bookish version of male display. But that gives the wrong impression of him. In the flesh he cuts a very different figure: more metrosexual than macho.
His most famous physical characteristic is his hair – a result of his mixed-race background, as his mother is Jamaican-born. Before we meet I had imagined encountering the spitting image of Art Garfunkel, whose likeness Gladwell has himself recognised – at a speaking engagement with the shorter, stockier New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, Gladwell introduced them both to the audience as Simon and Garfunkel. In fact, the comparison that hits you when you come face-to-face with Gladwell is with a young Bob Dylan. He tells me he has just had his annual haircut and so has lost that Garfunkelesque blooming afro. He also dresses in the Dylan style – blue jeans, black trainers, several layers of vests and T-shirts.
As if he hasn't made fellow writers jealous enough already with three bestselling books that have turned him into a brand, Gladwell is now bringing out a fourth, though this one is more modest than the preceding trilogy: it is a collection of his New Yorker essays, selected by himself from his 13 years on the magazine.
Tina Brown, who now edits the current affairs website The Daily Beast, brought him on board at the start of 1996 as one of her happening young things. She recalls that, "We were on a talent-spotting spree and it was clear that Malcolm Gladwell was very bright." What she didn't know then was that he would turn out to be, as she puts it, "a natural editor of the culture, a force of nature in the way he propels his work into the conversation".
Gladwell's breakthrough idea came almost immediately. He wanted to find out why crime in New York City, his adoptive home, had plummeted since 1990. He began digging, and was surprised by what he found. There was no dramatic cause for the steep decline, no draconian police roundup or seismic demographic shift. Rather, a sequence of seemingly trivial acts – removing grafitti from subway cars, apprehending fare dodgers, mending broken windows on housing estates – had combined to contain and then eradicate the city's crime wave.
Brown, who had plucked Gladwell from relative obscurity on the Washington Post, was pleased with the piece and displayed it prominently on her magazine's cover. She took the expression he used in the article for the headline: it was The Tipping Point.
But Gladwell felt there was more juice to be squeezed from the theory that human behaviour is often like an epidemic, starting small then growing until it reaches a critical mass and tips into a phenomenon. It could be applied as equally to the spread of products, messages and fads as to murder rates; to the selling of Hush Puppies as much as to fare-dodging on the Manhattan subway. Put like that, this was a Big Idea that could unlock the secrets of how modern change happens the way it does.
The publisher Little, Brown was impressed, and reputedly backed him with an advance of $1.5m. Its faith was richly rewarded. The book version of The Tipping Point came out in 2000 and has sold more than 2m copies. Blink, a romp through the power of instinctual thinking, followed in 2005 with equally astonishing results. Then Outliers, last year's exploration of the social factors behind individual success, earned him another seven-figure advance.
The essays in his new book, What the Dog Saw and Other Adventures, bear many of the classic Gladwellian hallmarks. They are simply and directly told, with the aid of a dizzying array of illustrations to support his argument. He moves effortlessly from individual stories to learned academic treatises to sociological observation and back to the individual. The writing is vibrant, colourful and packed with surprises.
Writing about the plane crash that killed John Kennedy Jr, Gladwell commissions a pilot to take him on a simulated nosedive of the sort Kennedy must have fallen into, known as a graveyard spiral. He profiles a so-called dog whisperer who tames violent dogs – hence the book's title. In another piece – Gladwell's favourite, he says – he spends time with Ron Popeil, a manufacturer of kitchen appliances, giving the reader a wonderful insight into the mindset of a minor genius from New Jersey.
The small-scale nature of Popeil's genius is an important clue as to why Gladwell has gone on to such gargantuan success. He scrupulously sets his sights not on the rare or unfamiliar, but on the ordinary and mainstream. As such, his writing talks to all of us, by dint of the common questions he seeks to ask, such as how can you tell if someone is going to be good at their job, or why is there no alternative to Heinz Tomato Ketchup?
"I'm interested in slightly dumb, obvious questions, right," he says. "I'm not interested in really deeply weird, obscure things. My tastes are not idiosyncratic. What I'm interested in turns out by happy circ*mstance to be what lots of people are interested in."
To make his point, he deploys a very Gladwellian trick: he shoots off on an anecdote. "I'm a car lover, but a paradoxical one because I don't love expensive cars. I drive a Golf. And the reason I love the Golf is that it is the most interesting solution to a problem – how to make a great car to sell for $23,000. Now that's hard; that's really interesting. The Ferrari is beautiful but so what, you charge $250,000 for it, what's hard about that? The Golf GTi is a really amazing car for $23,000. That notion of battling constraints, of the degree of difficulty, is what impresses me."
This fixation on the middling has earned Gladwell brickbats that he specialises in the art of the obvious. They don't bother him at all. "I don't mind the criticism that I explore the obvious, because that says I'm still trafficking in those familiar common questions, which is where I want to be."
Where did that interest in middle-of-the-road values, assumptions and products come from? He launches into a discussion of his half-English roots. "We're not exotic, the Gladwells. We don't have exotic tastes. My father is from Kent. He's from a middle-class family from Kent – this is who we are."
He giggles, in a way that is part pride, part mischievous self-deprecation. So is there a part of him that is forever Kent?
"I suppose there is. My father grew up in Sevenoaks. I once told that to a Londoner, who burst into gales of laughter. I didn't realise Sevenoaks was symbolic of a certain solid middle class."
Yes, accountants, I say.
"My grandfather was in insurance, so there you are. And the town I grew up in in Canada was a little farming town, so I'm not constitutionally focused on the exotic."
Indeed, Gladwell is an English Canadian New Yorker with Caribbean roots who rarely writes about race – although he did bring his great-great-great-grandmother, who had a child by her white slave master, into Outliers. That book also points out that former US secretary of state, Colin Powell, is a distant relative. Otherwise, though, he has never made much of his blackness, having never felt it to be a description of himself to which he can relate.
"I don't know what I am. I'm part West Indian: what does that mean? I had my DNA tested and I am 23% black, or whatever the term is – that's a meaningless thing. I guess I'm a quadroon, or whatever it is."
There is, though, one label he attaches to himself with certainty: outsider. Gladwell feels himself to be mainly Canadian, which in America is to be an outsider – as he has frequently been reminded in recent weeks by the US healthcare debate. "You feel so non-American when you see these crazy people who have no clue about what it means to have universal healthcare. Never before have I been so reminded of my outsiderness than during this debate."
His father is a mathematician, and from him, he says, he acquired a tremendous respect for academics. "I realised when I was older that there's a persistent attitude in people that academia is farcical. I've never had that. I've had exactly the opposite. My assumption has been that there's value in almost all of it, if you take the time to read it properly. And that comes from being in a family in which you were taught to revere expertise."
Such reverence is another Gladwellian hallmark. He is constantly turning to experts of various shades to elucidate a problem. He likes to think of himself as a "translator" of learned thinking for the mass reader.
At best, that enriches his writing with intriguing detail drawn from sociology, psychology, anthropology and a host of other ologies, which he uses to challenge received wisdom and open up new debates. In particular, he turns to science to support the argument that underpins so much of his writing – the idea that no man is an island. We are all subject to social forces that impact on our behaviour (as in The Tipping Point), governed by our subconscious thoughts (Blink) and blown around like leaves by the vicissitudes of timing and social privilege (Outliers).
This may be an unrevolutionary thought in the UK, where Margaret Thatcher long ago failed to convince us there was no such thing as society. But in the US, where the American dream and individualism still reign supreme, it remains a central intellectual battleground.
At worst, though, Gladwell is at times guilty of taking deep intellectual work and making it shallow, like spreading Marmite so thinly it loses its bite. One reviewer of Outliers slated it as an intellectual striptease.
Again, Gladwell professes to be unfazed by the criticism. "There's a constant issue of tone: who do you want to read these pieces, and how do you want them to be read? I can write them in a way that is deeply satisfying to a professor of philosophy at Princeton, but we all know if I do that I'll lose everybody else, and I can do it at the other end of the spectrum for a 10-year-old. You have to pick where you want to be, which for me is somewhere around the middle. Maybe a little to one side of the middle."
Which side? He looks slightly taken aback by the question. "I like to think I'm on the high side of the middle. Upper-middlebrow. That's what I am. Upper-middlebrow."
What The Dog Saw And Other Adventures by Malcolm Gladwell is published by Allen Lane, priced £20
Gladwell's day
8.30am I lead an astonishingly boring life. I always wake up at 8.30, unless I've set the alarm for 8.30, in which case I wake up at 6.30. Why is that? I'm not one for breakfast; just a cup of tea maybe at one of the cafes down the street from my apartment, where I sit and try to figure out what's wrong with whatever it is I'm writing. I always have one thing I'm writing that's working, and two that aren't. 10am-1pm Brood for a while. Write a little. Then ride my bicycle to New York University Library and nose around the stacks. 1.30pm Have a panini at an Italian place near the library, and read the New York Times. Then I answer emails, maybe read something that just came in from Amazon. 5pm Go for a run along the river. Then if there's football on, I'll watch that. 11pm-midnight If Lee Child has a new book out, I read – but really slowly, so I can make it last. Sleep. Repeat.
