I finished Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief last night. I was determined to finish it yesterday—not that it wasn’t good, but I want to be immersed in fiction at the moment, not, you know, informative and entertaining non-fiction. Without my deep love of the movie Adaptation, I would never have chosen this book. I’ve already read my share of the minutiae books, The Botany of Desire and the like (books that examine one minute thing–there’s one about a pencil, one about dust, etc).

The book, besides being about John Laroche (the orchid thief himself) and a brief and highly entertaining history of orchids and orchid-growers, is about passion. Orlean goes to Florida to interview Laroche for the New Yorker, decides to expand the article into a book, and begins her journey with a certain notion of Laroche—as a wildly unique person with a bizarre passion for orchids. In time, though, her notion changes:

When I had first heard of Laroche I had thought of him as an extremist, a madman with a passion for orchids that was far removed from the average way that people feel about plants, about anything. Then I met more and more orchid people in Florida who were utterly devoted to, utterly engrossed in, their plants. (135-136)

Most of the book is devoted to the mania of collecting, Orlean’s fascination with the passion of others, and exploring the reasons why we seem to need such passion in our lives. Based upon the evidence, it does seem that orchid lovers turn into fanatics more often than not. Early on she asks a park ranger why he thinks orchids in particular seem to have such a huge draw:

“Oh, mystery, beauty, unknowability, I suppose,” he said, shrugging. “Besides, I think the real reason is that life has no meaning. I mean, no obvious meaning. You wake up, you go to work, you do stuff. I think everybody’s always looking for something a little unusual that can preoccupy them and help pass the time.” (38)

Another theory for why we devote ourselves to orchids, Fiestaware, comic books:

The world is so huge that people are always getting lost in it. There are too many ideas and things and people, too many directions to go. I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty but full of possibility. (109)

Or perhaps:

They sincerely loved something, trusted in the perfectability of some living thing, lived for a myth about themselves and the idea of adventure, were convinced that certain things were really worth dying for, believed that they could make their lives into whatever they dreamed. (201)

And this is where she finally ends up: while dancing around the idea for 282 pages, in the last few she sums up the root of collecting, of mania:

[M]ost people in some way or another do strive for something exceptional, something to pursue, even at their peril, rather than abide an ordinary life. (273)

I am not sure that most people do, but I admire Orlean for saying so.