I recently finished Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. His argument that successful people are products of their environment isn’t groundbreaking, but his knack for juggling disparate facts about lawyers, pilots, and hockey players keeps you reading (and he’s finally curbed the habit of coining irritating phrases like “Stickiness Factor” that plagued The Tipping Point). With his third book, Gladwell comes to destroy the myth of the ’self-made man’ and he succeeds with a strategic deployment of pattern-seeking and fact-finding. For instance, after noting that nearly 1/5 of the richest people of all time were Americans who made their fortune in the late 1800s, Gladwell offers the emergence of railroads and Wall Street in the 1860s as an explanation. He concludes:

If you were born in the late 1840’s, you missed it. You were too young to take advantage of that moment. If you were born in the 1820’s, you were too old: your mindset was shaped by the pre-Civil War paradigm. But there is a particular, narrow nine-year window that was just perfect for seeing the potential that the future held. All of the 14 men and women on that list had vision and talent. But they also were given an extraordinary opportunity. . .

It’s an addictive book. On every page you come away with a new understanding of the engine that drives success, as illustrated by law school admissions, airplane crashes, and countryside vendettas. At the same time, I was digging into Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March. Now, comparing Gladwell to Bellow is pointless because 1) both writers have incredibly different agendas for their craft and 2) Saul Bellow is, well, Saul Bellow and many have argued that Augie March is the closest thing we have to Great American Novel (although I’d argue that the title belongs to Delillo’s Underworld).

That said, I’d like to draw one quick comparison between Outliers and The Adventures of Augie March: Gladwell dedicates 320 pages to convincing us that successful people are influenced by their families, their culture, and the times into which they are born. After absorbing his evidence, we accept this. On the other hand, Saul Bellow opens his big novel from 1953 with:

I am an American, Chicago-born — Chicago, that somber city — and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes not so innocent . . . 

From here, Bellow drags us hard by the wrist through a jangled world of hapless parents, a conniving grandmother, a romantic milkman, a paralyzed entrepreneur, and dozens of other neighborhood characters. Augie schemes for free eyeglasses, sells newspapers, unloads boxes at Woolworth’s, and runs a cigarette stand — all before page 40. We take a much-needed breath as chapter five opens:

All the influences were lined up waiting for me. I was born, and there they were to form me, which is why I tell you more of them than of myself.

And this is the book. In the first fifty pages, we experience Gladwell’s thesis as a laughing, crying, frustrating fact of life and for the next 554 pages we watch as Augie gets buffeted by the strange forces brewing in Depression-era Chicago. Sometimes he turns them to his advantage, but most of the time he fumbles.

Considering these two books side-by-side, Gladwell and Bellow aren’t that far apart in their intent: each writer wants to show you how factors beyond discipline and talent can seal a person’s fate. Both writers look hard at the idea of ‘character’ and rattle the cages of destiny and free will  — and each writer is a master of his chosen form, which makes the strength of each type of writing more apparent: Non-fiction argues and convinces. Fiction makes you believe.