Kris and I have both recently finished reading Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief.
We both agree the book is rambling and pointless, without much of a story. It meanders from here to there and back to here again. Here is where we differ: Kris hates the book, I think that it is brilliant.
The Orchid Thief does lack a traditional story. It is even unclear who the titular orchid thief really is; it could be any of half a dozen people. As Orlean recounts her descent into the world of Floridian flora, she spins off scores of stories and anecdotes, most of which seem to bear little relation to each other. Then the reader comes to realize that what the author is really describing is the nature of madness, of obsession, and that the supreme irony of the book is that she herself is caught in this madness and obsession, is part of it: she is obsessed with the story that she is pursuing. "I suppose that is exactly what I was doing in Florida, figuring out how people found order and contentment and a sense of purpose in the universe by fixing their sights on one single thing or one belief or one desire."
The book boasts crisp and vivid prose and an intelligent, witty narrator that guides us through the bizarre cast of characters who gravitate around the Florida orchid scene.
It’s brilliant. I can think of at least three people to whom I would recommend this book (to each for a different reason): Joel, Paul Jolstead, and Pam.
Below are bits and pieces from The Orchid Thief. Keep in mind as you read these excerpts that the "something" that Orlean refers to is generally orchids. (So that if she says: "these people live for something" it should be read as "these people live for orchids".)
Past John Stretch Park the roads bent through towns called Devil’s Garden and Bean City and Citrus Center and Harlem and Flag Hole and around wetlands called Telegraph Swamp and Corkscrew Swamp and Grassy Marsh and Graham Marsh. The land was marble-smooth and it rolled without a pucker to the horizon. My eyes grazed across the green band of ground and the blue bowl of sky and then lingered on a dead tire, a bird in flight, an old fence, a rusted barrel. Hardly any cars came toward me, and I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me feel lonely to the bone. The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility. If I had been an orchid hunter I wouldn’t have seen this space as sad-making and vacant -- I would have seen it as acres of opportunity where the things I loved were waiting to be found.
More and more, I felt that I was meeting [people] who didn't at all seem a part of this modern world and this moment in time -- the world of petty aggravations and obligations and boundaries, a time of bored cynicism -- because how they lived and what they lived for was so optimistic. They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectibility of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed.
Gary squinted up at the sky for a moment and then said, "Martin, we should try propagating these [fruits]. I brought a species back from Guatemala last week and it was bright orange inside, and it was just beautiful. We'll even name it for you. We'll call it motes reticulata. We'll make a fortune." Martin tilted his head like a sparrow. "Ah-ha," he said. "Bless its bright orange heart." Just then, one of Gary's nurserymen came up to talk to Gary. He was a slight, shy man with a Hebrew name who said he was born in Michigan and grew up in Brazil. It was not a very ordinary personal history, but nothing here seemed ordinary. The fruits were alien. Everyone and everything had an exotic pedigree. Sometimes in Florida you feel that you are on the edge of the world, and that the rest of the world sloshes in as regularly as the tide and produces strange and peerless things -- for instance, a Hebrew Brazilian Michigander raising salmon-colored Guatemalan fruit.
The orchid world had the intimacy of a family and the fights of a family. Like a family, it provided a way to fit into the world, to place yourself inside a small and sometimes crowded and sometimes bickering circle, and that circle would be surrounded by a bigger circle, and then an even bigger circle, and finally by the whole wide world; it was some kind of way to scratch out a balance between being an individual and being a part of something bigger than yourself, even though each side of the equation put the other in jeopardy. This has always been a puzzlement to me, how to have a community but remain individual -- how you could manage to be separate but joined, and somehow, amazingly, not lose sight of either your separateness or your togetherness. The two conditions go up and down like a teeter-totter, first one and then the other tipping the balance back. If you set out alone and sovereign, unconnected to a family, a religion, a nationality, a tradition, a class, then pretty soon you are too lonely, too self-invented and unique, and too much aware that there is no one else like you in the world. If you submerge yourself completely in something -- your town or your profession or your hobby -- then pretty soon you have to struggle up to the surface because you need to be sure that even though you are a part of something big, some community, you still exist as a single unit with a single mind. It is the fundamental contradictoriness of the United States of America -- the illogical but optimistic notion that you can create a union of individuals in which every man is king. I envied the orchid people all around me…and I envied the Seminole tribe members for the same reason, for having found and fitted themselves into a small and crowded circle, and if any of them had moments they had to step outside it and vouch for their independence from it, they seemed to be able to do it and then step happily back in. I even envied people like Laroche and Lee Moore who belonged to the cult of not belonging, which is its own small and crowded circle that gave them a shape for their lives, even if it was in bas-relief.
I wanted a Fakahatchee ghost orchid in full bloom, maybe attached to a gnarled piece of custard apple tree, and I wanted its roots to spread as broad as my hand and each root to be only as wide as a toothpick. I wanted the bloom to be snow-white, white as sugar, white as lather, white as teeth. I knew its shape by heart, the peaked face with the droopy mustache of petals, the albino toad with its springy legs. It would not be the biggest or the showiest or the rarest or the finest flower here, except to me, because I wanted it. In the universe there are only a few absolutes of value; something is valuable because it can be eaten for nourishment or used as a weapon or made into clothes or it is valuable if you want it and you believe it will make you happy. Then it is worth anything as well as nothing, worth as much as you will give to have something you think you want.
I never thought very many people in the world were very much like John Laroche, but I realized more and more that he was only an extreme, not an aberration -- that most people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional, something to pursue, even at their peril, rather than abide an ordinary life.
There is a deep stillness in the Fakahatchee, but there is not a moment of physical peace. Something is always brushing against you or lapping at you or snagging you or tangling in your legs, and the sun is always pummeling your skin, and the wetness in the air makes your hair coil like a phone cord. You never smell plain air in a swamp -- you smell the tang of mud and the sourness of rotting leaves and the cool musk of new leaves and perfumes of a million different flowers floating by, each distinct but transparent, like soap bubbles. The biggest number in the universe would not be big enough to count the things your eyes see. Every inch of land holds up a thatch of tall grass or a bush or a tree, and every bush or tree is girdled with another plant's roots, and every root is topped with a flower or a fern or a swollen bulb, and every one of those flowers and ferns is the pivot around which a world of bees and gnats and spiders and dragonflies revolve. The sounds you hear are twigs cracking underfoot and branches whistling past you and leaves murmuring and water slopping over the trunks of old dead trees and every imaginable and unimaginable insect noise and every kind of bird peep and screech and tootle, and then all those unclaimed sounds of something moving in a hurry, something low to the ground and heavy, maybe the size of a horse in the shape of a lizard, or maybe the size, shape, and essential character of a snake. In the swamp you feel as if someone had plugged all of your senses into a light socket. A swamp is logy and slow-moving but at the same time highly overstimulating. Even in the dim, sultry places within it, it is easy to stay awake.
If that prose does not excite you, then I suppose The Orchid Thief is not a book you should read. Me? I can't wait to read more from Orlean and to see the film based upon the book, Adaptation (reviews).
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