Passions In Susan Orlean's Obstaclean

Susan Orlean, a contributor to the New Yorker, writes about real people. In a Orlean piece one feels her subject’s enthusiasm for their craft bleed into her own enthusiasm for reporting it. Simply put, her writing makes the passions of others accessible to all. She makes it look easy. But how does she do it? Orlean writes to “startle” and “seduce” her audience (Boynton 289, 276). She writes to convince her readership to care about the passions of her subjects, whether they be surfing, inventing, or walking. However, she also writes about passions she thinks about which her readers would never care or learn organically (Boynton 276). How many of us would leap at an opportunity to learn more about the history of treadmill desks? Not many, and
those who would might leap away into oncoming traffic. Yet, the invention of treadmill desks is the subject matter of Orlean’s “Walking Alive.” Orleans mixes the dryness of ambulatory cubical life with the emotional backstory of James Levine who built his first treadmill desk before they were commercially available (Walking). She includes personal details of his lifelong struggle with his weight such as his childhood nickname, “Puffer” and comments his wife made to him about his weight (Walking). By linking humanity to a subject which is decidedly lacking in it, Orleans is able to invest her reader in a narrative’s outcome. We may not care if the treadmill desk market collapses tomorrow and obesity skyrockets, but we are more likely to care if it’s tied up in a personal struggle we can relate to. In her quest to relate to her audience, Orlean confronts issues of identity, namely the American identity, in her pieces (Boynton 290). In her interview with Robert Boynton she describes a typical subject of her writing as someone unlike herself (279). “My stories tend to fall into two categories,” she says, “the part of daily life you’ve never stopped to think about, and the fully realized subculture that I don’t know anything about” (Boynton 274). Her readers, she claims, do not have the time to strip back the layers of the seemingly ordinary or hidden lifestyles that she investigates (Boynton 275). Therefore, she acts as their liaison into an unseen world by providing them with an intimate relationship with a vanguard in that world. In order to convey to her audience this intimate relationship with her subjects, Orleans writes in a conversational tone. Instead of solely reporting her subject, her experiences are present in the piece as well (Boynton 289). In her piece on Maui surf girls she introduces the girls by their hair:
[They] love one another’s hair. It is awesome hair, long and bleached by the sun, and it falls over their shoulders straight, like water, or in squiggles, like seaweed, or in waves. They are forever playing with it—yanking it up into ponytails, or twisting handfuls and securing them with chopsticks or pencils, or dividing it as carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight yellow plaits…The Maui surfer girls even love the kind of hair that I dreaded when I was their age. (Maui 37)
She uses varying sentence length and syntax to mimic speech. She is not simply describing the girls’ hair to us, she is monologuing. The attention she invests in the girls indicates to her reader that they should also invest attention. Her excitement for her subject combined with her rich detail triggers excitement in her reader and immediately gratifies that excitement with concrete details. Then, she casually inserts her own opinion into the narrative to remind the reader that they are not viewing the Maui surfer girls through the eye of God, but a flesh and blood reporter. This grounds the information in reality. However, it is important to remember that Orlean’s writing ultimately serves as an entertainment for her readers.
Although she always attempts to write pieces which make good dinner party stories about real people, sometimes these two criteria do not align perfectly, so her descriptions of her subjects become single-faceted in order to be more relatable. Her details can gratify readers’ excitement without portraying her subject fairly. For example, she includes many remarks about the Maui surfer girls’ perfection in their youth (Maui 49). This language mimics the problematic societal belief of young girls as virginal paragons of their gender. Additionally, Orlean relies too heavily on the physical attributes of the surfer girls to relate them to her audience. Her readers are provided details of the surfer girls’ hair, their clothing, and their bodies as evidence that the reader should relate to them (Maui 37, 42, 46). The space devoted the girls’ personality and skill is dwarfed by physical descriptions. Orlean even goes so far as to describe the under-age girls as “sexy” (Maui 42). While this terminology may allow readers to relate to these girls in a way deemed normal by society, it does not help her reader understand them as real human
beings. Susan Orlean garners the interest of her readership by writing about passion, a human experience. In her writing, one can see the delicate marriage of subject and reader, and sometimes minor interjections from Orlean, the wedding officiant. However, sometimes she strays too far from her subject in order to cultivate this interest.