Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking
by Susan Cain
First Posted on December 2012
See my notes for my archived reviews of Drunk Tank Pink or Drink, or even the references built into this opening from twelve years ago. It’s all the same, these books that are predatory towards the intellectually curious, built with the bookstore equivalent of clickbait and stuffed with tedious anecdotes and weak correlations. It’s a formula that I couldn’t help myself from falling for, continue to sometimes pick up, and always, always get annoyed at.
Apparently I liked this one, though, as it seems like it was more research than fluff. Still a bad subtitle, though.
I was hesitant, because my typical rule for selecting books is to avoid titles that contain the word “power” in them, such as “_____ and the Power of _______” or “Harnessing the Power of ______ through ______.” I nearly stopped reading Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking as soon as I began: the Author’s Note contains two warnings: “...I did not use ellipses or brackets in certain quotations but made sure that the extra or missing words did not change the speaker’s or writer’s meaning,” as well as “Subject to the limitations of memory, all other stories are recounted as they happened or were told to me. I did not fact-check the stories people told me about themselves, but only included those I believed to be true.”
I pushed those concerns aside, because I am interested in the topic. As the author puts it:
Introversion—along with its cousins sensitivity, seriousness, and shyness—is now a second-class personality trait, somewhere between a disappointment and a pathology...[e]xtroversion is an enormously appealing personality style, but we’ve turned it into an oppressive standard to which most of us feel we must conform.
Quiet is successful in conveying the current climate of the Cult of Extroversion—from preschool to business school, celebrities to coworkers—and the impact on both society writ large and on individuals themselves.
Susan Cain is a strong writer and gives facts in both a clear and engaging manner. However, the frequent and detailed recounting the author’s quest for examples of introversion do the book no favors. They are juxtaposed with fascinating and deep analyses but all too often only serve to pad out a chapter: what is the reader supposed to draw from such specific interviews? "I'm searching for the open-air bookstore, where I'll be meeting Adam McHugh, a local evangelical pastor with whom I've been corresponding." This is background research, and should be treated as such; experiences that have informed the writing, not supplanted it. These sections feel like an invective from a publisher, an attempt to manufacture a personal journey via parablesque pablum in what is a technical and already interesting topic.
I do not need a Virgil to guide me through my nonfiction and am already happy to read the facts, studies, and conclusions the author has drawn from her research. There is little need in attaching the author’s anecdotes (subject to limited memory) or stories she has heard (but not fact-checked) every so often, particularly when they are there simply to add flavor but no real texture. Cain writes well and keeps the facts from being dry or boring or tedious; why it had to devolve into recounting a trip to a Tony Robbins’ seminar, I cannot figure out. This banality is overwhelmed by sections about Rosa Parks, or Mahatma Gandhi, or Eleanor Roosevelt, all of which are absolutely enthralling; pages dedicated to Harvard Business School’s synergy groupwork or Reebok International’s design offices show careful research and are a joy to read. But then, back to a literal recounting, complete with dates and times, of a personal trip to Saddleback Church. Or a fifth grade classroom. It feels like two books, and I have to wade through the travel journal to get to the compelling, well-researched, well-written parts.
Quiet seems to want to claim a piece of “...the self-help industry, into which hundreds of thousands of Americans pour their hearts, souls, and some $11 billion a year...” and lands firmly in the self-justification section. The anecdotes typically reinforce this dim view. Rather than appealing in a Mlodinowian style that provide a personal connection to the the underlying facts, many vignettes are simply synecdoche in the guise of specificity:
The quiet persistence shown by many Asians, and Asian-Americans, is not limited to the fields of math and science. Several years after my first trip to Cupertino, I caught up with Tiffany Liao, the Swarthmore-bound high school student whose parents had praised her so highly for loving to read, even in public, when she was a young girl. When we first met, Tiffany was a baby-faced seventeen-year-old on her way to college, She told me then that she was excited to travel to the East Coast and meet new people, but was also afraid of living in a place where no one else would drink bubble tea, the popular drink invented in Taiwan.
It’s not that the story of Ms. Liao isn’t compelling, it’s that she is meant to stand in for “Introverts” with a capital “i”. It reaches too far. That is what made so many sections of this book a complete slog; granular anecdotes are wedged into a framework that is then extended beyond their incredibly narrow scope.
Compare that to an example from the latter-half of the book:
When Emily lowers her voice and flattens her affect during fights with Greg, she thinks she’s being respectful by taking the trouble not to let her negative emotions show. But Greg thinks she’s checking out or, worse, that she doesn’t give a damn. Similarly, when Greg lets his anger fly, he assumes that Emily feels, as he does, that this is a healthy and honest expression of their deeply committed relationship. But to Emily, it’s as if Greg has suddenly turned on her.
Emily and Greg are the best vignette in Quiet. They are the thread that holds an entire chapter together, peppered in as anecdote and parable between paragraphs of research. The reader is drawn through pages that contain the highest number of citations to clinical studies—what the author might fear being decried as a “dry” section—by virtue of the interpersonal troubles Emily and Greg personify. While they are likely based on people the author has spoken with, this isn’t an exposé on the life of Greg and Emily. They serve as a device to bolster the points the author makes in all the ways that Ms. Liao did not. When the lens on Emily and Greg widens and the core of their tale extrapolated, there are no specifics of real personhood to obfuscate the lessons they were written to impart.
The section on Professor Richard Little is yet more proof that it is worthwhile to continue through the weak opening; it is personal without being overbearing, specific and current without the taint of frivolity or self-indulgence that pervade the chapters that followed the author and transcribed the events of day trips to churches, schools, or seminars. One gets the distinct feeling that a publisher read the Prof Little chapter and told Ms. Cain, “Yes, you nailed it! Find a way to fit these journalistic interviews throughout the rest of your story.” What Prof. Little’s section has is twofold: a theory—Free Trait Theory—and a story—a beloved public speaker that hides in toilet stalls in search of alone time. The theory and the story propel the chapter forward, with Prof Little as a bridge, both proponent and case sample. “In otherwords, introverts are capable of acting like extroverts for the sake of work they consider important, the people the love, or anything they value highly.” This functional duality is missing from the sections of other self-described introverts: a questionnaire answered by a student doesn't add much besides tedious detail that typically cannot be applied beyond that isolated instance.
There are many parts that are a joy rather than a slog:
“Even multitasking, that prized feat of modern-day office warriors, turns out to be a myth. Scientists now know that the brains is incapable of paying attention to two things at the same time. What looks like multitasking is really switching back and forth between multiple tasks, which reduced productivity and increases mistakes by up to 50 percent.”
This line is written with the aplomb of obvious fact and sourced and cited with an end note. It conveys the precise style of authority that pop-nonfiction credence is built upon. It draws a specific instance—multitasking—and generalizes it across all people while allowing the reader to extrapolate the point to as far as they feel comfortable.
Quiet is admirable in sections and dreadfully pointless in others. While the ideas alone make the book worth recommending, a large percentage of the format is truly unfortunate. I want more:
Kagan hypothesized that infants born with an especially excitable amygdala would wiggle and howl when shown unfamiliar objects...not because they were extroverts in the making, but because their little bodies reacted strongly to new sights, sounds, and smells. The quiet infants were silent not because they were future introverts but because they had nervous systems that were unmoved by novelty.
and less:
It’s a Tuesday morning in October, and the fifth-grade class at a public school in New York City is settling down for a lesson on the three branches of American Government. The kids sit cross-legged on a rug in a brightly lit corner of the room while their teacher, perched on a chair with a textbook in her lap, takes a few minutes to explain the basic concepts.