The central theme of Michiko Kakutani’s The Great Wave is simple. It is written on the cover: outsiders drive innovation and they have been the cause of various disruptions in human history. It is not a groundbreaking argument to make.
The unremarkable observation would have made the book an uninteresting read for me, except she manages to pull me back in with her comment on arts and culture, an area where she is clearly an authority. Kakutani formerly worked as a book critic at the New York Times.
She tells how those living on the margin of US society—blacks especially but also immigrant communities generally—were cultural innovators who eventually dictated mainstream tastes in music, movies, literature and comedy. They were innovators because they were less bounded by orthodoxy of the (white) majority and that the dual nature of their identity (that as a member of a minority community and as an American) allowed them to reach out to multiple sources for inspiration.
Kukatani cites a long list of authors and artists to show just how prevalent the outsider-turned-insider phenomenon is in the US. The list feels like a long must read recommendation that reminds me of another book of hers, Ex Libris, which is a list of 100 or so modern-time books that she believes worth reading.
While going through that cultural section of The Great Wave, my mind wanders to another book I read earlier this year. Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties also has the outsider-insider theme, although it appears more implicitly within the context of the 1990s. Klosterman’s discussion is specific to the the evolution of the rock genre, which began as the favored noise among youth with marginal taste in music (in the 1950s if I recall correctly) and then turned into billion-dollar megabusiness that Kurt Cobain’s Nirvana rebelled against.
So, I find The Great Wave interesting in the sense that it is a companion to The Nineties. Kakutani provides a generalized theory that explains Klosterman’s specific cases.