What Good Writing Is

A common way to praise an actor is to say, "I could listen to/watch him read the phone book." If you would allow us to tweak this saying to praise a writer, we would like to say here that we would willingly read a magazine article about the phone book if it were written by Michael Lewis.

Michael Lewis, currently a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, might be the best magazine feature-writer working today. His best-known work is probably Moneyball (2001), a book about the new economics of baseball that enthralled both sports fans and business junkies--and probably a whole bunch of other readers, as well; along the way, it made a celebrity of Oakland A's general manager Billy Beane and had tremendous influence on the way baseball executives tried to put together winning teams. He also published a book about football, The Blind Side (2006), and recently completed a major-sports trifecta with an article for The New York Times Magazine, "The No-Stats All-Star" (February 13, 2009), about basketball.

Now, you might say, "Well, Solipsist, you're a sports fan. Of course you would find these pieces interesting." Fair enough. But Lewis's primary subject--even in many of his sports articles--is the business world. Suffice to say the Solipsist generally has little to no interest in the world of high-finance, which seems mostly to consist of people who make and lose obscene amounts of money for doing apparently nothing. But Lewis can even be gripping on these subjects. Here's the opening paragraph of "In Nature's Casino," an article about catastrophe bonds, from the August 26, 2007, Times Magazine:

"It was Aug. 24, 2005, and New Orleans was still charming. Tropical Depression 12 was spinning from the Bahamas toward Florida, but the chances of an American city's being destroyed by nature were remote, even for one below sea level. An entire industry of weather bookies--scientists who calculate the likelihood of various natural disasters--had in effect set the odds: a storm that destroys $70 billion of insured property should strike the United States only once every 100 years. New Orleanians had made an art form of ignoring threats far more likely than this; indeed, their carelessness was a big reason they were supposedly more charming than other Americans. And it was true: New Orleanians found pleasure even in oblivion. But in their blindness to certain threats, they could not have been more typically American. From Miami to San Francisco, the nation's priciest real estate now faced beaches and straddled fault lines; its most vibrant cities occupied its most hazardous land. If, after World War II, you had set out to redistribute wealth to maximize the sums that might be lost to nature, you couldn't have done much better than Americans had done. And virtually no one--not even the weather bookies--fully understood the true odds."

Nothing special, here, really--nothing spectacular. But Lewis quickly and expertly establishes his main themes--the carefree carelessness of New Orleans, the business of predicting catastrophe, the fundamental American optimism (or naivete) that allows people to overlook the possibility of massive disaster--in a way that draws in even those who by mid-2007 thought they had read everything they would ever want to read about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath.

Lewis has a way of crafting a sentence to maximize its effect. Here's a nifty little example of reverse parallelism from a recent Vanity Fair article on Iceland's financial collapse (yet another topic we would hardly have thought to be intrigued by):

"Tall, white-blond, and handsome, Olafsson looks exactly as you'd expect an Icelander to look--which is to say that he looks not at all like most Icelanders, who are mousy-haired and lumpy." ("Wall Street on the Tundra," April 2009)

Did we say we would read Lewis if he wrote about the phone book? From the same article:

"[T]he Reykjavik phone book lists everyone by his first name, as there are only about nine surnames in Iceland, and they are derived by prefixing the father's name to "son" or "dottir." It's hard to see how this clarifies matters, as there seem to be only about nine first names in Iceland, too."

If one of the marks of a good writer is the number of times he or she makes you stop reading to laugh and read a passage to whoever happens to be in the same room with you (despite the fact that they're trying to watch TV or something), then Michael Lewis is a seriously good writer. Check him out.