by Rebecca Baumgartner
I never intentionally set out to read what one critic referred to as “landfill nonfiction,” and yet it seems harder than ever to avoid falling into such a book by accident. The term is a bit harsh, but you probably already have some idea of what kind of books I’m talking about.
These are the books with bright covers and upbeat titles that follow roughly this formula: This is Actually Pretty Obvious: A Really Overblown Claim about How We Can Fix Everything and Maybe Even Have More Fun. Many of the books I’m talking about would be shelved in the Self-Help section of your bookstore (remember those?) but the format has now expanded to include popular science, general psychology, sociology, politics, economics, and more.
One of the first things you notice about landfill nonfiction (which I’ll call “pop nonfiction” to be less mean), aside from the formulaic, casual title and the trendy aesthetic of the cover, is the abundance of “malcolms,” folksy anecdotes that an author uses to gently and obliquely introduce a topic to readers imagined to be intellectually shy and prone to bolt at the first sight of a difficult idea.
Often, the malcolm seems to have no relevance to the topic at hand, at least at first. The coy author-as-compère is waiting for the right moment to show you why this story is relevant. The more random the malcolm seems, the more satisfying will be the payoff (or so it is supposed) when the author ties it all back together. A story about a day in a busy hospital that started like any other, or the author’s boat trip with his wife, or a scene from Fiddler on the Roof, eases you into an intellectual project without shocking your system with too much thinking right off the bat. It’s nonfiction writing envisioned as PowerPoint presentation, a corporate icebreaker and team-building exercise before you get down to brass tacks.
I’ve noticed that a lot of malcolms, especially the ones that crop up in an introduction chapter, follow an inspirational redemption arc: I was a burnt-out young doctor who realized that the hustle and grind mindset wasn’t working for me anymore. I was a mom at home during the pandemic with a husband who wasn’t pulling his weight and I finally hit the breaking point. I never cared about eating healthy but then I got a diagnosis that was a wake-up call. I was a big-time city slicker but then had to move to a small town and adjust to a slower pace. I had always put my job first but then someone died and I realized what was truly important in life. I was a Silicon Valley executive who had everything but nevertheless felt like something was missing.
And it always ends with some variation of this: “And that was the moment I realized I needed to find a new way of doing things.” As David Brooks put it in his latest pop nonfiction book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen: “I vowed to alter my life.”
By the way, that’s another feature of this kind of nonfiction: frequent paragraph breaks. If you put more than one or two ideas next to each other, readers get confused or bored.
It makes these books read a lot like TED Talks sound.
Easy to digest. Very snackable. And if you want to drive a point home?
You give it its own paragraph.
In part, the smug, breezy tone of many nonfiction books is because so many of them are actually padded versions of an article the author originally wrote for another venue. They wrote a piece for the New York Times that got a lot of clicks and someone asked them to turn it into a book. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, provided there is indeed more for the author to say on the topic. But in reality it means that many of the pop nonfiction books I’ve read lately have felt very much like what they, in fact, are: Articles with a few loosely-researched ideas that have put on a lot of water weight so they can fight in the 150-to-200-page weight class.
But the writerly style and voice, not just the length, of a piece for The New York Times or The Atlantic is different from that of a book – or at least it should be. There’s a chattiness to a lot of journalistic writing that doesn’t always translate well to a book format, where the increased page length, experienced over days or weeks, comes to feel like being trapped on an international flight next to someone who keeps making dad jokes. Something that would be fine – amusing, even – in a news article, opinion piece, or Substack post usually doesn’t result, when stretched out, in the kind of book that rewards deep concentration or critical analysis.
The language of most pop nonfiction books is unforgivably simplistic, sometimes even childish. I don’t want to pick on How to Know a Person too much; it’s not the worst example, it’s just the most recent one for me. Nevertheless, this book contains the following truisms and non-insights that I feel are characteristic of the shallowness of thought and rudimentary language of this kind of nonfiction:
“Each person you meet is involved in a struggle.”
“If you understand someone’s traits, you understand a lot about them.”
“Each of us has been given the gift of a unique personality.”
“Personality traits are a very important part of a person’s makeup.”
“To be anxious is to be jittery, while being depressed means feeling sluggish.”
“People who grow up in different cultures see the world differently.”
“We all know people who are smart. But that doesn’t mean they are wise.”
These statements aren’t even interesting enough to be false – their propositions aren’t even worth fact-checking, or remembering, or having a conversation about. Entire books are filled with this kind of useless stuff, finding new ways to tell us what we already know, with a self-satisfied tone to boot, as though these thoughts about human nature came to them under a banyan tree. What kind of reader does the author have in mind when he writes these statements?
And it’s not simply a matter of preferring more complex language for its own sake; there are facts at stake. For example, the statement about anxiety meaning someone is “jittery” and depression meaning someone is “sluggish” is insultingly oversimplified and dismissive, and – especially for a book that’s all about seeing people deeply – is an instance of grossly misrepresenting what life is like for the people who have to live with these conditions. When complexity and nuance are scrubbed out, it’s the truth that suffers. It’s not that I want to read denser language for the hell of it; I want an accurate and interesting explication of the world, and paltry efforts like this don’t get us there.
Aside from issues of language and style, the prevalent mode of producing pop nonfiction today is also suffering from the effects of a very small gene pool. The same studies and talking points get recycled over and over again, presented each time as though they are a revelation to the reader. If I have to read a summary of the Marshmallow Test or the Gorilla Experiment or the Prison Experiment or the Grant Study one more time, I can’t be held accountable for my actions. These studies, and others like them, come up over and over again, regardless of the topic of the book, as though an Intro to Psych professor were giving extra credit to anyone who mentions them in a term essay. The palpable excitement with which the author leads up to the “big reveal” of the Gorilla Experiment makes me feel sorry for them. They’re like a dad renting a Santa suit to surprise kids who stopped believing in Santa years ago.
It’s embarrassing, yes, and it feels frustrating to be condescended to. But the real problem is the author’s failure to understand their audience. A writer should have some idea of what their target audience is already familiar with. If you’re writing a book about interpersonal connection or self-care or capitalism or cognitive science, you should probably assume your book is not the first on that topic your readers have read. If you simply must mention the Marshmallow Test (do you really need to, though? Like, really?), maybe just refer to it in passing and put the full explanation in a note at the end for the 17 people in your target audience who haven’t heard of it.
(I also have to wonder how many of the conclusions from these endlessly recycled studies are even valid, given the replicability crisis in psychology and other fields. If the Gorilla Experiment turns out not to have been valid this whole time, then I am even angrier about having to read about it 4,000 times.)
I’ve wondered if this – the malcolms, the extremely short and choppy paragraphs, the “we’re just buddies hanging out at the bar talking about how to make the world a better place” tone, the rehashing of the same studies over and over, the statements of the blindingly obvious, the oversimplified language – is deliberate or not. Is it a cynical ploy to keep eyeballs on pages by appealing to the lowest common denominator, or has the standard authorial voice, after a couple of decades marinating in YouTube and a feedback loop of other pop nonfiction, truly become this shallow and falsely chummy?
Regardless of its sincerity or lack thereof, the homogenization and TED-Talkification of ideas is a standard feature of popular nonfiction, either because writers are incapable of writing anything more rigorous, or because readers aren’t demanding anything more rigorous, or because cynical editors think readers are incapable of understanding anything more rigorous. Whatever the case, readers who want nuanced, robust overviews of complex ideas are left high and dry, and they feel misled by the publishers and writers who promised that very thing and failed to deliver.
It would be simple to dismiss these concerns by saying that some readers are just pickier (or the inevitable insult: elitist). Or if not pickier, then naive for expecting books to meet their idealistic standards and looking in all the wrong places for satisfaction. As the book critic Christian Lorentzen says, “This reader is simply bad at being a consumer. He doesn’t know how to spend his money on products that will please him. He is not in touch with his own taste and ways of satisfying it.” If there’s any duty we should be good at fulfilling by now, surely it’s being a good consumer!
The irony is that these types of picky/elitist/naive/bad consumer readers want to read accessible nonfiction as much as the writers want to make their books accessible. It’s just that they have a different understanding of the term “accessibility.” Writers and editors seem to think it means dumbing things down, stating the obvious, not taking any risks, and rejecting a scholarly tone. But what accessibility really means, in my view, is no more or less than a way of exploring an idea that does not sacrifice clarity in the pursuit of accuracy. To me, an accessible book is simply one whose argument I can follow and whose insights I can appreciate without having a degree in that field.
By contrast, to publishers and perhaps to some readers (though fewer than I think we assume), an accessible book means one that will entertain you while you wait in the doctor’s office. An accessible nonfiction book is thus intended for the person looking for something more virtuous than scrolling on their phone, but not so virtuous that they have to make an effort to understand anything demanding or out of the ordinary.
We know that true accessibility, under my more curtailed definition, is certainly possible, because there have been many nonfiction writers who have managed to make their material clear without talking down to the reader or abandoning rigor. In no particular order, a very abbreviated list would include Oliver Sacks, Richard Dawkins, Matthew Desmond, Rebecca Schwarzlose, Atul Gawande, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, Johann Hari, Alison Gopnik, S. Josephine Baker, Daniel Dennett, Steven Johnson, Michael Pollan, George Orwell, Richard Wright, Philip Kennicott, Matthew B. Crawford, John McWhorter, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Stanislas Dehaene, Yascha Mounk, Philippa Perry, Oliver Burkeman, Sherwin B. Nuland, and Vera Brittain.
All of these writers, across all their various writing styles and fields of expertise – including medicine, philosophy, biology, cognitive science, linguistics, history, politics, music, psychology, sociology, and neuroscience – share the fundamental trait of assuming their readers are intellectually curious, even if they aren’t trained in the topic at hand.
This stance toward the reader as a peer is ultimately, I think, what differentiates good nonfiction from the dross. All the sins of lazy thinking and immature writing I’ve discussed here follow from the author writing for “an audience of imagined idiots,” in the words of book critic and editor Becca Rothfeld. Referring to Ryan Holiday’s book The Daily Stoic, Rothfeld says:
“To write as if your audience is made up of your intellectual inferiors, as he does, is not to make philosophy ‘accessible,’ but rather to render it, however inadvertently, snobbish and alienating. I cannot help resenting the assumption that I am incapable of appreciating ancient philosophy on my own, or the suggestion that I could only ever savor the complex flavors of the primary sources if they were converted into snackable nuggets. The guiding premise of The Daily Stoic is that its readers are not peers but pupils.”
If a reader is disappointed by the promises of a pop nonfiction book, expecting an Alison Gopnik or a Steven Pinker and getting something far less fulfilling, it’s not the reader’s fault for being out of touch with their own taste, or having standards that are too high; it’s the author’s and/or publisher’s fault for making an appeal to standards that they weren’t capable of satisfying, failing to treat their readers as equals, and showing up empty-handed to the intellectual commons.