Last year I read a book called “The Revolutionary Genius of Plants” by Stefano Mancuso and enjoyed it tremendously. Human life IS dependent entirely on plants!! Neat. From the suggested reading material in the back, I cribbed a few titles that looked interesting, and “The Orchid Thief” was among them.
This book is very clearly a few investigative journalistic long form pieces extended into a book. So, it centers around a titular thief, involved in a poaching incident inside a Florida state park undertaken with Seminole tribe members. While the evolution of the case provides the impetus for writing the pieces, truly I found the “main character” quite uninteresting. Men with an inflated sense of their personal memorability are boring; as the kids say “do not @ me.” Oh, you’re a thief who is convinced his motives are far beyond the peer of mere mortals? What are you, a lazy JKR character? Yawn.
Other than disliking the parts of the novel that were centered on the thief himself and the author’s continued preoccupation with his supposed individuality and uniqueness, I liked this book. I didn’t realize how fucking cool orchids are as a life form, their evolutionary and biological complexity, and how they are one of the most populous in number of unique plants and biomass among the category of flowering plants.
I also thought the focus of the author’s investigation, namely the mechanism and an attempt to dissect the nature of passion and community, was more revealing of white American culture than she had perhaps intended. I think this point is best illustrated by the following quotes:
“I wanted to go to the community dinner, but it was Indians-only, and no one I appealed to for permission would budge. Vinson explained that it would bother the older people to have a white person at the dinner – that no matter how many years they’d been mixing in the non-Indian world, they still felt separate and suspicious. “White people, it’s your job to make money,” he said to me. “Indians, we have our own job. Our job is to take care of the earth. We are different from you and we always will be.”
“This has always been a puzzlement to me, how to have a community but remain individual – how you could manage to be separate but joined, and somehow, amazingly, not lose sight of either your separateness or your togetherness. The two conditions go up and down like a teeter-totter, first one and the other tipping the balance back. If you set out alone and sovereign, unconnected to a family, a religion, a nationality, a tradition, a class, then pretty soon you are too lonely, too self-invented and unique, and too much aware that there is no one else like you in the world. If you submerge yourself completely in something – your town or your profession or your hobby – then pretty soon you have to struggle up to the surface because you need to be sure that even though you are part of something big, some community, you still exist as a single unit with a single mind.”
These quotes appear in separate chapters, and I think wrestle with the true conflict of the novel, which is the author reacting to her realization that the stories that pique her curiosity are about thriving, active communities. As a journalist by trade she dives deep into niches but never becomes part of them (e.g. “I’ve never considered myself a Florida person” appears in the first chapter).
I was disappointed by the lack of analysis of Orlean’s desire to attend this dinner that is expressly off limits to her. But WHY did you want to go so badly, Susan? Why did you want to force your participation in a community that is not yours and thus does not welcome you? [Is this is what they teach you in J school?] It would make more sense to become a “Florida person” than to shoehorn your way into spaces that are closed to you.
The author’s bewilderment around community directly translates into what she finds worth including in the book. She is fascinated by the easy-come, easy-go nature of the titular thief, who moves from infatuation to infatuation abruptly and resolutely. She is entranced by those who dedicate themselves entirely to one obsession, albeit with less narrative focus on them (my theory here is people who don’t change are harder to write about compellingly).
The quote above that pits togetherness and separateness as two ends of a spectrum is an inherently white world view, which I don’t think the author ever unpacks meaningfully, despite being given an incredible jumping off point from Vinson, a Seminole man and also another one of the orchid thieves, who concisely sums up what he sees as the difference between white and Indian cultures. In many cultures, you are always individual and of always part of a collective, but in my experience, white culture demands polarity as a means to impose a rigorous, if false, order on the world. The white world sees individual identity and connectedness as a binary that cannot be resolved, merely opposites to teeter in between. We have a capacity for both individuality and community that is not zero sum, which is what I wish had been explored more deeply in this book.
Lani.Tech 