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
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