The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup

REVIEW
A Yearbook Editor's Book of Years
New Yorker staff writer and former Willamette Week scribe Susan Orlean releases a literary greatest hits.

by SUSAN WICKSTROM
243-2122 ext. 328


In the late '70s, a fresh-faced college graduate came begging for a job at a small Portland newsweekly, armed with a dream and her high-school yearbook, which she had edited. "I made it clear at the interview," she writes, "that I would absolutely, positively die if I didn't get hired." Since the newsroom was too small to accommodate corpses, the bosses threw her a bone.

Susan Orlean wasn't so desperate 13 years later when The New Yorker hired her as a staff writer. It almost seems fated that she would end up at the magazine, since she claims it's what inspired her to write quirky features in the first place.

These are the first lines of Orlean's first Willamette Week article, which ran May 29, 1979: "Dust off your love beads and shake out your peasant dresses. The '60s aren't back, but outdoor concerts are." Her leads may have improved in the last 20 years, but her dogged determination to find cultural importance in everyday detail remains. With that debut, Orlean didn't simply preview a concert at Portland International Raceway starring the Grateful Dead, Sammy Hagar and Patti Smith. She slammed the age of disco, brilliantly compared the evolution of outdoor rock concerts with the spirit of Deadheadism, and predicted that new meat Patti Smith might steal the show. It was an auspicious entrance to professional writing, and she never looked back. Now Orlean has joined the stampede of New Yorker writers who have culled their best work from that magazine to publish a literary version of a greatest-hits album: Jamaica Kincaid, Arlene Croce, John Lahr and Gail Shivel.

The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People is a compilation of Orlean's New Yorker profiles, along with work that appeared in other national magazines such as Esquire, Rolling Stone and Outside. In these pieces, she reveals the essence of an ordinary 10-year-old boy, a gaggle of teenaged surfer girls in Maui, a New York City taxi driver who happens to be king of an African tribe, Tiffany, a show dog and--lest we forget--Tonya Harding. But as a whole, this collection reveals even more about the writer herself.

Orlean makes her presence known in her work. This is how she begins "The American Man, Age 10," an article from Esquire: "If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes." From the very first sentence, the writer is a major part of the story, leading us through the introduction to young Colin.

One of Orlean's techniques is to cast herself as an interpreter into another individual's private landscape. Usually, the result is charming; she toes the line of obtrusiveness with self-deprecation and basic curiosity. Sometimes she annoys, like when she had to sleep with her jacket over her head during a Maui surfer girls' slumber party. But Orlean makes up for any self-indulgence with her generous eye for detail and the skill to convey it in words. Here's her description of a showdog boxer: "His face is turned up and pushed in, and has a dark mask, spongy lips, wishbone-shaped white blaze, and the earnest and slightly careworn expression of a small-town mayor."

Orlean will obviously do anything to get her story, as "Figures in a Mall," her profile of Tonya Harding, proves. Orlean never interviewed the beleaguered battle-ax. But she toured a new housing development in Clackamas County; interviewed DJs at the skating rink and an anger-management program director; had the name Tonya analyzed at a mall computer; and attended Sunday service at the Celebration New Song Four-Square Church that meets at the local Holiday Inn. By portraying Tonya's world, she portrays Tonya.

But the one thing that underscores Orlean's talent is her reverence for telling a story. By the end of Bullfighter, after reading all she's been through to serve her craft, even the most cynical New Yorker basher must admit that Orlean is entitled to a greatest-hits collection after all.