Readers of this blog will know that I positively reviewed a book by the political scientist Brian Klaas. That book, Corruptible, enthralled me from start to finish. Every anecdote and data point reached a startling conclusion that really changed how I thought about the world.
So late last year, when I heard that Klaas had a new book coming out in January called Fluke, I was thrilled. I bought it immediately.
Unfortunately, I read it.
I’ll be blunt: this book was one of the biggest letdowns from an author I otherwise enjoy. I was completely taken aback. Confused reasoning, unclear examples, and pointless tangents dominated the entire book. Where was the lucid thinking, clear prose, and convincing arguments of his previous work? Klaas’s strikeout was so dramatic that I decided to perform an autopsy. What went wrong here? I enjoyed Corruptible because he examined the subject of power from every conceivable angle, including a few angles I didn’t even know existed. I will break down the mistakes and warning signs from this book in a similar manner.
Did The Author Screw Up?
As Klaas’s name is on Fluke, the answer is to some degree yes. Klaas did something wrong, but did he do something wrong because he’s a mediocre writer, because he just doesn’t suit my tastes or because of something else? As Corruptible shows, Klaas is a first-class non-fiction writer who can deliver the goods when the occasion demands it. We’re not dealing with a lack of innate talent or inadequate training. Similarly, this isn’t a matter of taste, at least not on my part. One more time for the folks in the back, I love his other books. So this isn’t a case of a ‘great writer’ that other people love who I just don’t get. Therefore, the problem is isolated to this book, but what part exactly?
Is The Thesis Feasible?
Klaas’s book is found in the ‘smart thinking’ section of the book store, which is a silly euphemism for ‘this author is arguing an idea he or she had’. As the title suggests, Klaas is making the case that flukes play a significant role in our lives and we ignore them at our peril. Okay! If you can summarize your idea in a single sentence, that’s a promising start. Furthermore, on the surface, there’s much to support this idea. Though I myself am nowhere close to an expert, I’m aware that a mix of decision theory, historical anecdotes, probability science and a few careful references to Albert Einstein’s early 20th century physics could support a thesis along the lines of what Klaas proposed. So the idea itself isn’t a non-starter.
But as the final book Fluke reveals, the idea did not survive the acid test of reality. This is a common occurrence. How many plans work on paper but spectacularly fall apart in practice? (Looking at you, Communism). Does that mean the idea was flawed from the beginning and Klaas just didn’t see it?
Not necessarily, but how could that be? I’ll give you an example. One of the most influential non-fiction books of the past decade is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Anybody who needs an intro to behavioral economics should at least pretend to have read this book. Kahneman essentially invented that field with a series of ground-breaking papers he wrote with his longtime collaborator Amos Tversky in the 1970s. Thinking Fast and Slow takes those ideas and presents them for a general audience. But important as that book is, Kahneman’s prose demands every ounce of your attention. It’s a bit dry, as are most books by academics attempting to reach the lay reader for the first time. Kahneman’s reputation and the significance of his contributions to psychology make the book a must read anyway, but it’s certainly not easy. Normally, that would be the end of the story, but five years after Thinking Fast and Slow came out, Michael Lewis released my favorite book of all time, The Undoing Project. That book is a biographical sketch of not just Kahneman but also his genius collaborator Amos Tversky. Lewis wrote about the same ideas in Thinking Fast and Slow but did so in a way that cleared out Kahneman’s academic clutter. Same ideas, different books, wildly different outcomes.
Or as Tversky himself said, ‘people don’t choose between things, they choose between descriptions of things. Change the description and you change the decision.’
Applying Tversky’s quip to Fluke and Klaas’s bewildering failure to deliver, the idea of a book about flukes isn’t itself a no-go for launch, it’s how that idea landed on the page that matters.
The True Cause. It’s Not A Causing B or B Causing A: It’s C Causing A and B.
If Klaas himself isn’t the problem and the idea itself isn’t the problem, then the true problem with Fluke is how Klaas thought about it…or, more specifically, didn’t think enough about it.
By the end of Chapter 2, it was obvious that Klaas was out over his skis. His understanding of the ideas was half-baked and he clearly didn’t think them all the way through because the application of the research material to his general thesis contorted the structure of the book beyond recognition. And as a result, Klaas failed the basic test I apply to all books: if you can’t understand a book, it is objectively bad. Worse still, bad books have a horrible tendency to slow your reading experience down, trapping you in their terribleness. In general, the faster a book reads, the more time the author has spent mastering the material. That wasn’t the case here.
So obviously the book was a bummer, but was it that unexpected? Did Klaas simply try his best but not succeed as we all do? Or were there clues available to Klaas and his publisher that indicated they needed to reconsider releasing this book?
The Clues
Of course there were signs. I’ve been at this game a while and clues that a book is undercooked can be found everywhere, and not just the text. Clues can even be found as early as the front-flap jacket.
1) Fluke’s Flap Jacket
The flap jacket of a hardcover book is used for marketing copy. Rather than pollute the back of the book with a summary or a sales pitch, it’s easier to hide that information in a dust jacket. Here is a key excerpt of this marketing copy for Fluke: “In the perspective-altering tradition of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan comes a provocative challenge to how we think our world works—and why small chance events can divert our lives and change everything, by social scientist and Atlantic Writer Brian Klaas.”
The publisher overshot their mark. How come? Because they compared this new book to The Tipping Point and The Black Swan. For those unfamiliar, those two books are some of the most famous books published in the last twenty years. The central ideas in those books reached a mass audience and became near essential reads. The problem is that comparing your new, untested book to some of the greatest in the field raises expectations to stratospheric levels which are rarely if ever met. It would be like if a record company released an indie band’s debut album and billed it as being on par with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Dark Side of the Moon. Furthermore, product comparison usually demonstrates the seller’s insecurity. Deep down, I suspect most advertisers know the public makes a product iconic, not the other way around. So the big comparison presenting itself before I even reached page one was the first clue that something was amiss.
2) Imagine All The People
Reading (or more accurately, slogging) through Fluke, you’ll notice a repeating word in Klaas’s prose: imagine. Frequently, Klaas implores the reader to imagine a hypothetical scenario or situation to get his point across. For example, this is the opening of Chapter 4: “Imagine two creatures: we might call them Truth Creature and the Shortcut Creature. The Truth Creature sees everything exactly as it is, able to visually perceive every molecule of oxygen, every stream of ultraviolet light, each atom within every bacterium lurking under each toenail. Every possible fragment of visual information is perceived and processed by the Truth Creature’s brain. Nothing goes unnoticed. By contrast, the the Shortcut Creature can’t see any of that detail, but instead only perceives and processes that which is most useful to it. All else is either ignored or invisible to that creature’s perceptions. As a result, the Shortcut Creature cannot sense most of reality.“
There are any number of problems with this paragraph including but not limited to the excessive amount of detail. Klaas could have sliced out the extra verbiage about Truth Creature at a stroke and just left it at “Truth Creature sees and perceives everything in the universe”. Excessive verbiage shows the central subject is too small for a book.
But the more problematic phrase is “imagine two creatures”. Pro tip for new writers: asking readers to imagine something for which there is no real world reference like a Truth Creature (what the hell even is that) leaves the reader adrift precisely because they lack the mental schema to make that imaginative leap.
And yet, that very problem crops up over and over again in Fluke. Making the problem even more insidious is the fact that Klaas is writing an argumentative book. By demanding the reader imagine something, it demonstrates Klaas lacks concrete, real world evidence for his thesis and gives the reader no recourse to challenge him on his theory. Even a paltry historical anecdote would be stronger than an imaginative exercise.
3) Ball-Busting The Fourth Wall
An incomplete thesis supporting imaginative examples are bad enough, but even more serious red flag is Klaas’s adventures into what Steven Pinker, in his book The Sense of Style, calls ‘metadiscourse’. By Pinker’s definition, ‘metadiscourse’ is ‘verbiage about verbiage’. What makes metadiscourses (and all related writing styles that are self-conscious and reflexive) so excruciating is they cognitively take up twice the load of a normal sentence. Klaas unabashedly indulges in such metadiscourses in Fluke which is shocking considering he successfully abstained from such perverse linguistic orgies in his previous book.
I won’t accuse anyone without proof so I’ll admit into evidence the opening of Fluke’s Chapter 9: “Motivational posters tell you that if you set you mind to it, you can change the world. I’ve got some good news for you: you already have. Congratulations! You’re changing it right now because your brain is adjusting slightly just by reading the words I’ve written for you. If you hadn’t read this sentence, the world would be different. I mean that literally. Your neural networks have now been altered, and it will—in the most imperceptible, minute way, adjust your behavior slightly over the remainder of your lifetime.“
This passage is a dereliction of writerly duty. For one thing, directly addressing the reader in that manner is inappropriate in the same way being sixty-years-old and asking a fourteen-year-old girl out on a date is inappropriate. Even if you’re not irritated by the way Klaas is addressing you directly, and I certainly was, him talking to you does nothing to advance the thesis on offer—a thesis that, remember, the burden is on him to prove. Adding to the sins of this and similar passages in Fluke is how Klaas’s explicit conversation with the reader distracts from the subject of the book. Another tip for new writers: deviations from the main subject or plot are to be removed. Always. What does that passage have to do with flukes or chance encounters? Breaking the fourth wall in movies is risky because doing so explicitly breaks the suspension of disbelief that is often essential to enjoying a story.
In the context of Fluke, Klaas’s constant use of the second-person doesn’t break the fourth wall, it ball-busts the fourth wall.
4) The Straw Man of We.
Another red flag in Klaas’s work is his reliance on the word ‘we’ to set up a premise. When making an argument, especially regarding how people feel about something, carelessly using the word ‘we’ makes the writer vulnerable to accusations that they’re building a straw man or drawing on an example that isn’t universally applicable.
For example, here’s another passage from Chapter 9 which uses this word inappropriately: “Yet, in modern life, many of use feel like easily replaced cogs in a vast, cold machine. As global corporations sprawl and we seek help from call centers rather than corner stores, many modern systems make us feel interchangeable. Workers robotically follow protocols, checklists, and scripts, engines of efficiency that strip us of our individuality. Humans begin to feel like robots who eat. It dehumanizes us. It doesn’t matter who turns the crank, so long as it gets turned. But what if that dystopian view is completely wrong?”
Who’s this ‘we’ he’s talking about? This passage makes assumptions about people’s behaviors (which has little to do with flukes I hasten to add) and not every reader can relate to it. The generalized use of the word ‘we’ should really be reserved for common truths, for example, “Today, we know Churchill and Roosevelt almost certainly knew more about the Holocaust than they were willing to admit’. Any person can join the generalized crowd of ‘we’ in that sentence because it’s not like the veracity of that information changes the moment someone else learns about it. Conversely, Klaas’s passage is not so common a truth. I, for one, don’t feel like a cog in a vast, cold machine. When I’m not writing this blog, I’m working as a lifeguard. The moment someone needs help in the pool, the protocols of my facility allegedly stripping me of my individuality kick in and start the process of saving someone’s life. And I doubt I’m the only person who feels that way. (Oh and Klaas’s final sentence—what if that dystopian view is wrong—only rubs salt in the wound because it signals to the reader ‘what you just read was pointless’. Paragraphs are meant to flow from one to the next, not exist in isolation like this one.)
Conclusion
All of these red flags come out in one circumstance: when the writer is not comfortable with their material. Brian Klaas is an expert in global politics, making him the ideal candidate to write about power structures as he did so beautifully in Corruptible. On the flip side, Klaas’s expertise in global politics gives him little training in chaos theory, cognitive science and the science of probabilities, leaving him ill-equipped to tackle the subject of flukes and random chance in history.
Writers and publishers who see these dangers in their books: ye have been warned.