Read Recently: “The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup” by Susan Orlean
Title: The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup
Author: Susan Orlean
Backstory: After reading The New New Journalism and meeting its author at the Texas Book Festival, I made a list of books by the journalists featured (Little did I know it had been done already) and decided to devote my library checkouts to “New Journalism” books as I saw my career branching out this way. Bullfighter was my first pick.
Notes: Collection of pieces Orlean did for her first 15 years as a staff writer at The New Yorker. Mostly glimpses of the unconventionally famous (The best female bullfighter in Spain, The “Lemon Ice King” of New York), the seemingly workaday (her hairdresser, a star high school basketball player) and the once-were (The Shaggs, considered the greatest 60s pop group no one’s heard of).
Verdict:
Orlean is quite possibilty the Joseph Mitchell of the 21st century. She’s a master at marathon listening tucked neatly into a Chinese box of one sharply observed character nugget after another. But where Mitchell’s profiles hung on exhaustive detail and vertical depth (Read a few pieces from Up in the Old Hotel, his collected works, to see what I mean), Orlean’s have a smoother surface. She doesn’t brag beneath her sentences about how much work she’s done for her quotes and her character sketches are a bright flash of insight quickly extinguished as the story barrels forward. When you’re done then with an Orlean piece, you’ve learned a lot about but she rarely claims to be the last word on the subject. She leaves a few questions on the table for you to either digest, puzzle and forget about or follow up on yourself.
The may be a product of magazine economics (she probably can’t rattle on for 15,000 words the way Mitchell could 50 years ago) or simply her personality, but what I love about Orlean is not just her subject choice but her honesty about how she came to those choices. When she includes the word “I” in an article, it’s to show how she found the subject not it reveals about her in choosing it. She leaves that to her selectivity. By not including everything in her notebook, she’s saying “Look, this is what I found interesting. If you’ve got questions, the answers are out there. Go find them.” Since she isn’t writing about political corruption, perhaps she has that luxury. It’s still refreshing to read a journalist who knows they’re not the only ones capable of telling a good story, even if they get to it first.
Highly recommended.
Followup:
Orlean guest blogs at Powells.com
Reader interactions
2 Replies to “Read Recently: “The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup” by Susan Orlean”
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Kevin,
You are right on about Orlean. Her pieces illuminate not only the unconventionally famous, but also the ordinary. I can’t remember if her piece on the 10-year-old boy is in “Bullfighter” or not, but that is a marvelous essay on the nature of 10-year-old boys, especially as they grow up now. And then there’s “The Orchid Thief.”
Kevin,
You are right on about Orlean. Her pieces illuminate not only the unconventionally famous, but also the ordinary. I can’t remember if her piece on the 10-year-old boy is in “Bullfighter” or not, but that is a marvelous essay on the nature of 10-year-old boys, especially as they grow up now. And then there’s “The Orchid Thief.”