Most books about business are boring. A great exception was Liar's Poker, Michael Lewis' funny, knowing depiction of the monstrously giddy frat-guy world of investment banking.
Liar's Poker was the perfect nonfiction companion volume to Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities in the 1980s canon.
During the decade since, Lewis has produced good, charming, thoughtful journalism about business and politics, but I was unprepared for the accomplishment of Lewis' new book about Silicon Valley entrepreneur -- and chairman of Netscape Communications Corp -- Jim Clark. The book, The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story, is a gem.
It's a splendid, entirely satisfying read, intelligent and fun and revealing and troubling in the correct proportions, resolutely skeptical but not at all cynical, brimming with fabulous scenes as well as sharp analysis.
Lines that seem slightly portentous at the beginning of the book -- "The business of creating and foisting new technology upon others that goes on in Silicon Valley is near the core of the American experience'' -- by the end seem unquestionably true, fully borne out by the tale Lewis has told.
Turning Point
The New New Thing may be to Silicon Valley what Samuel Pepys' diary was to 1660s London or Mark Twain's Roughing It to the American West of the last century.
Lewis chose to focus on a single, pivotal Silicon Valley player -- a new-capitalist adventurer who "could have made it big at no other time in history.''
The result is a wide-ranging but sharply focused chronicle that gathers force and clarity as it unfolds. It was shrewd of Lewis to pick a subject who is important but not a household name -- not a Bill Gates or a Steve Jobs or a Steve Case.
The New New Thing thus reads, for most of readers, like fiction in the best sense, providing character revelation and narrative surprises all along the way.
The book tells the story of the engineer and entrepreneur Jim Clark, reported and written as Clark continued to bestride and transform Silicon Valley -- and by extension the US economy.
Lewis does not say, but nonetheless proves, that the 55-year-old Clark, not Gates or Jobs or anyone else, is the grandest figure of that realm -- at least as accomplished and more interesting, inspiring and likeable than his younger peers.
Raised poor and fatherless in a dreary Texas town, Clark must have been a candidate for his high school yearbook's "Least Likely to Succeed" section. He unleashed a skunk at a dance, exploded a bomb on a school bus -- but wasn't actually expelled until he told a teacher to "go to hell." Because Clark had never before encountered a multiple-choice exam when he joined the US Navy in the early 1960s, and since most of the an-swers seemed to him partly correct, he circled them all. The Navy accused him of cheating, certain he had tried to fool the computer scoring the tests -- which was, in a particularly Dickensian moment of ironic injustice, the first time Clark had ever heard of a computer.
Nine months later, however, he scored higher than anyone else on a math test and was promoted to algebra instructor.
Hooligan Instincts
After the Navy, his life continued its new upward swing -- marriage, a master's in physics, a doctorate in computer science -- but Clark's hooligan instincts messed that up in short order: his first marriage collapsed, his second wife left him after he was fired for insubordination from a teaching job and he sank into a clinical depression.
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