I have conflicted feelings about the writing of Michael Lewis. He is a gifted, charming story teller and often has his way with language. I have yet to buy one of his books, but when I see an article by him, I typically perk up and make time to read it. As I read, I'm usually swept along by the language and the unfolding plot. But, when Lewis writes about social issues, I'm also left with an empty feeling by the end of a piece. The writing doesn't falter from a technical perspective, but the point of view that Lewis favors begins to feel, often, thin and limited. Lewis has a blind spot when it comes to race and class and this would matter less if he stayed away from subjects like Katrina and the NFL.
Lewis' new piece in TNR is a good example of this. Titled "My Katrina Aftermath," the piece tells the story of Lewis' returning to his family's vacation home in Waveland, Mississippi, or rather the plot of land on which a second home once stood. I kept reading the piece, waiting for Lewis to talk more honestly about the devastation of the storm, waiting for him to move from Waveland to some other Gulf Coast community, where the word aftermath might have more gravity. But like Bush's myopic elegy for Trent Lott's vacation home in the immediate wake of the storm, Lewis stays focused on the vacation home, and sepia-toned memories of growing up in New Orleans.
Thematically, some of his points about ownership and trespassing point toward larger, meatier social observations. But Lewis doesn't go the distance and ultimately his musings sound like those of an aristocrat, fumbling for a foothold of meaning in one of the greatest domestic social disasters of recent times.
This isn't to begrudge Lewis his "Katrina experience." But one would hope that there'd be more self awareness in his voice, even a nod toward the bigger picture of the storm, toward what aftermath might mean to someone who lost family members, a primary house, a job.
Write what you know is a classic bit of introductory writing instruction. This is sound advice, certainly, and often leads to affecting writing. But sometimes this adage needs to be conjoined to another bit of advice: know more, and then write.
And this is where I'm puzzled by Lewis. He's a good, and thorough, researcher, and a sophisticated writer. These oversights on his part aren't the false steps of a novice. They're the habits of a seasoned writer who opts out of difficult subject matter.
This fall, an excerpt from his latest book, The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, appeared in the NYT Magazine. It was well-written, funny, imminently readable. And the story it told -- about a white family who adopted a black boy and helped him get through high school and into Ole Miss on a football scholarship -- was as riveting as it was layered. But by the conclusion of the excerpt, I felt the same emptiness that I did in reading the Katrina piece.
(For reasons described above) I haven't read the entire book, so let me be clear that I'm only talking about the article here.
In the family he profiled, Lewis found the human elements of his subject. What better way to tell the story of the evolution of the offensive line than through a tale about a poor, quiet black boy and the affluent, effusive white family that adopted him and then groomed him into a NFL prospect? Gripping stuff, this. And this is where the tensions, and the fatal flaw of Lewis' writing, emerge. This family's narrative was bigger, in the extreme, than the highly specific sports story Lewis is so adamant about telling. The family's story involved race, religion, class, questions about belonging, identity, the different kind of truths and lies we tell. But faced with this story, or with the larger story about Katrina, Lewis ducked. Keeping his gaze firmly on the football question, he failed, at least in the pages excerpted in the NYT, to rise to the moment as a chronicler of more than quirky Southern lives and the engines of profit in sports.
If Lewis were a lesser writer, it would be easier to just stop reading him. But he's quite good, and so I do keep reading. In my mind, he occupies the role of a
frat boy with promise, the one who will inevitably be highly successful and who -- you just hope -- will have an experience sooner rather than later that
cultivates a greater sense of empathy and moral engagement. Katrina could well have been this experience, but apparently it wasn't.