The New New Thing. - Review - book reviews

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1999 by Elise Ackerman

THE NEW NEW THING By Michael Lewis W.W. Norton, $25.99

THE AUTHOR'S MOTHER WARNED JIM Clark not to talk to her son, and when the storied entrepreneur finally saw the galley for The New New Thing, he wished he had listened to her. Michael Lewis had told Clark that he was writing about Silicon Valley. That was true, strictly speaking. It would have been more accurate, however, if Lewis had said he was writing about Silicon Valley as reflected through the remarkable life and singular times of Clark--a 55-year-old digital anarchist cum computer cowboy with a proclivity for creating software programs that blew up the U.S. economy. But this admission might have prompted Clark to limit the hospitality he extended toward the wickedly humorous author, whose kiss-and-tell account of his days as a bond salesman, the best-selling "Liar's Poker", exposed the underbelly of Wall Street. Instead, Clark welcomed Lewis into his life, allowing him to rummage through unopened boxes of personal effects and inviting him on a transatlantic voyage.

Lewis spent 18 months observing Clark's efforts to build the world's largest single-mast sailboat and to construct an Internet company, called Healtheon, that would revolutionize the American health care industry. At some point, Clark learned that Lewis was, in fact, writing a book about him. "I thought, well, that's strange, I didn't know that," Clark recalls. He asked Lewis about it. "He said, `It's really about other things, other than you. But you are the central character.'" In retrospect, that remark should have tipped Clark off about Lewis' intentions. Nevertheless, this most prescient of engineers, credited by many for starting the Internet stampede with the development of the Netscape browser, did not foresee how Lewis would describe the role he played in the Silicon Valley fun-house. That, perhaps, is to Clark's credit.

"I basically was kind of shocked when I read it," Clark remembers. "He allowed me to read it--not to edit it--because I was only allowed to change one word inaccuracies, like a name" Though the book is a spritely read at only 274 pages, it left Clark exhausted. "My first impulse was: I've got to hurry up and hire a CEO for MyCFO [his latest multibillion-dollar venture] because after this book comes out I won't be able to hire anybody."

If Lewis had not written such a wonderful book, we might be tempted to hold this small act of deception against him. But even Clark--a man whose list of past hurts is meticulously kept and spectacularly avenged--forgives the author. This is not because Lewis` portrait is flattering, balanced, or well-rounded. But it is immensely entertaining and stunningly insightful. More parable than profile, Lewis sets out to explain how techno-geeks like Clark irrevocably transformed the economy and in the process accumulated fantastic wealth. In the hands of a lesser writer, the topic would have been soporific. At its heart, after all, are the tough sinews of software code connected to the dry bones of servers and silicon wafers. However, Lewis` book is not about the physical attributes of the digital revolution, it is about its soul.

Why did Lewis focus on Jim Clark rather than Bill Gates or Andrew Grove or any of hundreds of lesser-known cyber-caudillos? On one hand, it can be argued that few have Clark's track record--he has created four multibillion dollar companies, three of which are public. Clark is either uncannily lucky or preternaturally perceptive. Still, one suspects that the reason Lewis chose Clark is less for his accomplishments than for his character. To explore Silicon Valley's animating force, Lewis needed someone whose feelings and emotions were accessible, not guarded behind a wall of insecurity and fear. Why do people like Clark push for radical change when so many of us are content with the way things are? There are no easy answers, but Clark's complicated--and transparent--psyche provides some clues.

"Clark had one of these faces that virtually screamed what he was feeling," Lewis writes. "The pucker was its way of letting you know he was irritated ... His face would redden, and his mouth would twist up into a mouth-of-the-volcano pucker as if it were trying to suppress the inevitable lava. The mood in the air once his mouth went into its pucker was a bit like the feeling you might get when, climbing what you thought was a mountain, you looked up and saw smoke billowing from the top. When you spotted the pucker, you froze, turned, and scrambled back down to safety. You found another place to pass the afternoon."

Clark is an impatient man. Not impatient in the sense of someone who hates to wait, but impatient in the sense of someone who suspects there is something hugely important he should be doing. Unlike most people to whom that adjective is attached, Clark does not necessarily shed nervous energy. When he speaks, he drawls. His impatience is a metaphysical event. He needs change the way other people need sleep. Clark attributes this impulse to outside forces--the desire to prove himself to those who have humiliated him, a hankering for money, a craving for achievement. Yet, as Lewis follows Clark across oceans and into boardrooms, chronicling his amazing amassment of treasure, it becomes clear that he is propelled by more inchoate energies. In one scene, Lewis watches Clark struggle to fill out a questionnaire that requires him to state his occupation. "There was no name for what he did," Lewis writes. "For that matter, there is no name for what he is looking for" Lewis settles for calling the objective of Clark's impatience the "new, new thing."