The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Ballantine Reader's Circle)
by Susan Orlean

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Book Reviews of The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Book Review: Get Orchidelirium from Orlean
Summary: 5 Stars

But a couple of things prepared me for what I was getting myself into. First, Adaptation does a good job of introducing the audience to the characters of Susan Orlean and John Laroche before it takes them in an entirely different direction in the last third. And second, my own bibliophilic tendencies well-prepared me for the orchid obsession described within the book's pages.

"John Laroche is a tall guy, skinny as a stick, pale-eyed, slouch-shouldered, and sharply handsome, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his front teeth."

The first line of the book is one of those that could easily become a classic--a first line that, at the very least, will be included in one of those quizzes of first lines. It instantly describes the character 1 and puts you in a place where you are instantly familiar with him. (It is a testament to the moviemakers that they chose Chris Cooper for this role, who, like Laroche, is handsome--and became a sex symbol as a result of Adaptation--in spite of appearing in the film with no front teeth.)

(This keeps turning into the film review I thought I wasn't going to write, but I think I'll just go with it and see how it turns out. It does make sense that I would notice similarities and differences in the film and book, so we'll just see what happens.)

Orlean's prose is conversational and introspective. Like the film (there I go again!), the writer is really the main character here. She tells the story, and how the orchid obsession surrounding her affected her (for one thing, it made her fear contact with the flowers lest she become obsessed), and there are scenes where Laroche is not present, but never one where Orlean isn't. In the end, I was fascinated by Laroche, but I remained distant, as I was simply being told what things about him Orlean wanted me to know. However, Susan Orlean herself came through as a fully-realized character, with all her prejudices and motives intact.

The Orchid Thief is a quick read and I enjoyed every page. My only complaint is with the ending. Kaufman calls the book "sprawling New Yorker-type stuff" and it resembles that magazine's fiction choices in the infamous manner of them not having endings. The book simply stops. I was being carried along--and didn't notice how close I was to the end due to the Reading Group guide in the back--and then I felt dropped as Orlean ends her book without even having finished her current scene. It was as if she said, "282 pages, that's enough" and then hurried up to finish. She normally used the mechanism of "show, don't tell," but in order to wind it up quickly, she tells an event, that could have taken up another five or ten pages, in half a paragraph. It was jarring and didn't fit in with the tone of the rest of the book.

But, as I said, that is my only complain with a book that taught me a lot about flowers and about its author. I noticed that Orlean has written other books (some of which are in the column on the right), so I think I'll check some of those out.

Summary of The Orchid Thief: A True Story of Beauty and Obsession (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

The Orchid Thief centers on south Florida and John Laroche, a quixotic, charismatic schemer once convicted of attempting to take endangered orchids from the Fakahatchee swamp, a state preserve. Laroche, a horticultural consultant who once ran an extensive nursery for the Seminole tribe, dreams of making a fortune for the Seminoles and himself by cloning the rare ghost orchid Polyrrhiza lindenii. Laroche sums up the obsession that drives him and so many others:

I really have to watch myself, especially around plants. Even now, just being here, I still get that collector feeling. You know what I mean. I'll see something and then suddenly I get that feeling. It's like I can't just have something--I have to have it and learn about it and grow it and sell it and master it and have a million of it.

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