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In the grand scheme of things, Malcolm Gladwell is no Rodman, no Collins -- not even a Deepak Chopra or a Barbara Cartland. He's a low-highbrow nonfiction guy, a fact-piece writer of great talent but limited celebrity -- a New Yorker writer. But according to the best accounts, Gladwell's agent managed to negotiate an advance of $1.5 million for "The Tipping Point," while not even the lowest of the lowball estimates suggests a sum below the $1 million mark. Naturally, this news caused a certain amount of speculation in the publishing world, chiefly as to what the hell might be the flaming-ass huge deal with the goddamned book and with that so-and-so Gladwell character who wrote it. And the inevitable question hung in the air: Can it be that good?

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference By Malcolm Gladwell Little, Brown and Company, 279 pages Nonfiction Buy this book at B&N.com

Nobody knows how much the goddamned book is going to sell (probably lots), but the short answer is no. It's not any better than you'd expect from a gifted nonfiction guy like Gladwell. The flaming-ass deal about him goes something like this: He is a fairly young writer, not yet 40, who made a sensation at the Tina Brown New Yorker three years ago with a piece called "The Coolhunt," about a type of marketing research in which companies send out field reps to track and survey really hip consumers in order to figure out what everybody else will probably be doing a year or so down the line. The piece was, in essence, about where buzz comes from and how it can be harnessed to commercial interests -- which was the one topic in the world, barring perhaps a nude celebrity cocaine brawl, that was most likely to set Brown's heart aflutter and prompt her to spread out a comfy pet bed in a warm corner of her office.

Gladwell had arrived. When Brown decamped the following year, it was a friend Gladwell had known at the Washington Post, David Remnick, who took over operations. This year "The Coolhunt" was tapped for display in Remnick's anthology "Life Stories: Profiles From the New Yorker." Gladwell had become a mainstay.

But this isn't success; it's only success at the New Yorker, an institution with a long tradition of anointing nonfiction superstars whose gemlike books end up launched straight over the bookstore display shelves and into the u-take-'em bins. And to continue the argument for the prosecution, "The Tipping Point" probably never seemed like an especially gemlike book in the first place: It's an eclectic sort of project that draws from a number of Gladwell's disparate, though mostly buzz-oriented, New Yorker pieces on such topics as the science of shopping, the diffusion of trends and the "broken window" theory of crime control. All in all, the book is supposed to be about the way small ideas can spread in epidemic fashion when they reach a certain critical mass, "tipping" the conditions under which we live from one state into another.

A certain small, hip crowd in the East Village, for example, started wearing Hush Puppies for no reason that anyone has ever figured out -- a local trendlet that tipped into a full-blown movement, whereupon the Hush Puppies company found itself fielding calls from superstar designers and selling shoes as fast as it could make them. The crime rate in New York (and in the country at large) declined precipitously in the early '90s, for reasons never adequately explained. It just tipped. Rebecca Wells' "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood"? Tipped.

Of course, the fact that things tip isn't in itself a groundbreaking observation. Nothing, after all, succeeds like success. And if "The Tipping Point" were really just about things tipping, it would be a real botch of an expository work, all Frankensteined together out of a bunch of incongruous elements, such as syphilis epidemics in Baltimore, the vagaries of the athletic-shoe market, the problem of turnstile jumping on the New York subways ... Bernhard Goetz ... "Sesame Street" ...

No, the reason the publishing world dumped truckloads of money on Gladwell is that the book makes for a great primer on avant-garde logrolling and marketing techniques. It's the perfect buzz manual for the new century, culled from research in epidemiology, the social sciences, memetics, trend spotting and similar fields and from the author's own experience in the careening hype-mobile that was Brown's New Yorker. There are sections on "stickiness" and on successful pitchmanship, on behavioral research and on the mechanics of rumormongering.

Gladwell and his publicists attach a cheerful spin to all this, with the author rounding out his introduction by asking, in the manner of a do-it-yourself social-science manual, "What can we do to deliberately start and control positive epidemics of our own?" The publicity sheet remarks that "The Tipping Point" "contains a profoundly hopeful idea ... that one imaginative person, applying a well-placed lever, can move the world." Well, in order to earn back that huge advance, Gladwell is going to have to supply an awful lot of people with well-placed levers. And imagine that ruckus. Gladwell plans to destroy the world! It has been a long time since a supervillain has unveiled his doomsday device and demanded only a million bucks -- but maybe he's planning to ask for more once all the epidemics start sweeping the globe and those levers start pumping up and down. Maybe he's holding an antidote.

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