The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider

by Michiko Kakutani

Crown 2024

The most compelling part of Michiko Kakutani’s new book, The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider, is the copy on the front flap of the dust jacket.

The premise that Kakutani puts forward in the introduction of the book is compelling: The cultural and political phenomena of the last 15 years or so, she says, have followed a pattern in which outsiders have migrated from the fringes to the center of American culture. And while the text on the front flap is able to concisely summarize this argument, Kakutani’s own copy throughout the book dilutes the message while it aimlessly traipses around topics.

Ultimately, Kakutani falls short of getting to the root of why ultra-right-wing politicians and tech bros (and, on a more anodyne note, the once exclusively nerdy genres of science fiction and superhero comics) have moved from the wings of society to its center stage.

In one instance, she suggests that the 2008 financial crisis served as an inflection point in the popular imagination, but she’s vague about the specific mechanisms of how it did so, or what precisely changed.

The public evidently lost confidence in the financial system (and the government that bailed out its malefactors). But how, if at all, does the financial crisis explain the shift of culture from the margins to the center? Was it that creative types saw the disruptive power of the Occupy Wall Street movement and felt galvanized to take a similar democratic ethos to the arts and entertainment? Or was it the more pragmatic fact that traditional media outlets were left as empty husks, and online creators were able to fill in the cultural vacuum? Either of these might be an explanation, but this second-order analysis is absent from The Great Wave.

Instead, we are presented with broad explanatory statements, like this one: “Digital technology’s empowerment of outsiders dovetailed with the great wave of mistrust in experts and institutions that had been building since the 2008 financial crash.” That sounds reasonable enough, and certainly worthy of elaboration. The problem is, on this and many other topics, Kakutani doesn’t back up her assertions with details. Sure, she cites authors who have written on economics, science, and technology, but this reads like an exercise in bibliographic name-dropping rather than an attempt to critically grapple with those authors’ conclusions.

As a result, it’s difficult to tell if Kakutani intended to create a comprehensive framework for understanding the way that the world has turned upside down — or if the reverse-centrifuge is more of a convenient, but disposable, metaphor. (Speaking of metaphors: Kakutani’s choice of employing Katsushika Hokusai’s woodblock print “The Great Wave” as a leitmotif for her analysis is baffling, even after she attempts to explain it.)

The introduction introduces a note of optimism by citing the fact that previous moments of crisis have, in spite of the discomfort they brought to people at the time, served as the catalyst for what might be broadly called progressive changes. To this end, Kakutani cites Gershom Scholem in positing that we live in what she terms a “hinge moment,” when we have the most opportunity to shape the future for better or for ill. Again, this is an idea that seems very plausible, but besides being mentioned in the first few chapters (and being given some lip service towards the end of the book), Kakutani neglects to suggest ways in which we can, should, or might take the current moment to re-shape society.

Instead of using the past as a guide for the future, The Great Wave contents itself with glorying in a self-righteous vision of the last several years. An entire chapter is dedicated to the uppercase-r Resistance (an appellation even more stomach-churning now than it was in 2017) without stopping to examine whether this “movement” did any constructive work to bring the country together, or even to stop Trump. (So far, given the former president has de facto won the 2024 Republican primary, it does not appear to have changed sufficiently many minds.) Kakutani’s writing resembles the stupefied stammering of the “Not My President” camp of Democrats: So transfixed is she by the obvious outrages that she neglects to recognize and address the deeper illness of the system.

It’s a shame that The Great Wave is as blundering as it is, because that wasn’t inevitable. The edge that Kakutani has over many others is her storied career as a critic for The New York Times Book Review, which provided her with an unrivaled exposure to the literature of the late-20th and early-21st centuries.

Books on current affairs are a dime a dozen; invariably, their surveys of the present attempt to bypass that universal human requirement of retrospect: We need time for events to play out fully, and for our minds to slowly weave together the elements of the past in a way that makes for a relatively cohesive narrative.

One would hope that Kakutani would at least be more self-aware about these inherent limitations of the genre whose literature she is contributing to. Moreover, her experience with the slower pace of publishing and reading books might have tempered the knee-jerk politics she displays in the book.

But, alas, The Great Wave is a discombobulated and skimpy book with no clearly delineated argument. Kakutani attempts to write a sociological or political-science treatise without actually engaging with those subjects’ methodologies, scholarship, or even rigor. Instead, she takes the conventional wisdom of Trump-era liberal politicians and media outlets at face value, and then repackages them to her own readers without contributing a meaningful analysis of her own.

Douglas Girardot is a freelance writer based in New York City.