Perspective: Finding what's special in the ordinary world

On the cover of her new collection of profiles, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, Susan Orlean is standing with the tight knees and bowed back of a matador. In a black-feathered jacket and cerise lipstick and trailing a lush red cape, Orlean makes a fetching matador. Though she is not the bullfighter of the title, Orlean is very much a presence in her work.

To some degree, Orlean must appear, if only to explain why she has chosen her subjects, most of them obscure and ordinary.

"The challenge," Orlean, the author of The Orchid Thief, says in her preface, "was to write these stories in a way that got other people as interested in them as I was."

So, from the very start of a piece, a reader is learning about Orlean's tastes and sensibilities alongside the introduction Orlean is making to her most recent infatuation, be it an African king who drives a cab in New York, a championship show dog who looks a little like President Clinton, or an average 10-year-old boy from New Jersey.

But there is no hard and fast rule about how much "I" is too much in a piece of literary journalism. That's all feel. To locate the dividing line between Orlean and a clumsier writer, think of every time you have a read a piece in which the author mentioned his lunch date with the subject for no other reason than to record that he had been seen in public with a celebrity.

The 19 profiles and 16 brief "Talk of the Town" pieces in The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup are not arranged chronologically, but it is possible to see how Orlean's voice has grown increasingly confident and singular since 1987, when she first began writing for national magazines such as the New Yorker, Esquire and Rolling Stone.

Only Orlean uses "bosky" to describe a comfortable suburb or "wifty" to describe a 10-year-old's naive musings. Her similes are uniquely hers, too. "Almost any time you see him," she writes of the clothing designer Bill Blass, "there will be a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, bouncing like a little diving board."

But the hallmark of Orlean's voice is her trust in her own perceptivity. A profile by Orlean is not an assemblage of detail; it is the sum of her understanding. And when it comes time to explain the significance of a defining detail, Orlean is there to translate the exotic into the language of shared experience.

"The Maui surfer girls love each other'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 them carefully as you would divide a pile of coins and then weaving it into tight yellow plaits."

Those are the opening sentences of Orlean's 1998 piece in Women Outside magazine titled "The Maui Surfer Girls." Orlean goes on for a few more lines about the girls' hair, each sentence adding a layer of emotional weight to what might otherwise be a load of superficial prattle.

"The Maui surfer girls even love the kind of hair that I dreaded when I was their age, fourteen or so -- they love that wild, knotty, bright hair, as big and stiff as a carpet, the most un-straight, un-sleek, un-ordinary hair you could imagine, and they love it, I suppose, because when you are young and on top of the world you can love anything you want, and just the fact that you love it makes it cool and fabulous."

Orlean vowed she would never predict trends or spin social theories, but in the end she has managed to comment artfully on society through its unlikeliest representatives. It may not be on any political science syllabuses, but Orlean's profile "A Gentle Reign" about Kwabena Oppong, the cab-driving Ashanti king, is as illuminating about American politics as anything out there.

Too often, perhaps, Orlean will rely on a superlative in her lead sentence: The Shaggs were either "the best band of all time or the worst"; "The coolest person in New York at the moment is a man named Fred Brathwaite"; "The biggest, nicest thing a traveling gospel group might pray for is a bus."

And sometimes her understatement is a little too precious, such as when she describes "business disputes resolved with semi-automatic weapons." But these are such niggling complaints and they only show up when her pieces are jammed together cheek by jowl. Usually, people have a month or so to relish the last story and begin to pine for a new one.

- Bill Duryea is a staff writer for the Times.

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THE BULLFIGHTER CHECKS HER MAKEUP: My Encounters With Extraordinary People

By Susan Orlean

Random House, $24.95.

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