February 15 & 22, 2010 Issue

I want to get a mule. I haven’t always had this desire. In fact, before I’d read Susan Orlean’s wonderful “Riding High” in this week’s double issue, I didn’t know mule from donkey. It was the same regarding chickens. After I read, Orlean’s “The It Bird” in the magazine (September 28, 2009), I wanted to get some chickens. This wish was recently reinforced by my trip to Cuba, where it seems every backyard is full of chickens (and roosters). Orlean’s writing style seduces me every time. She’s a master of what I call naturalness. Her opening lines hook me every damn time. For example, here’s how she starts “The It Bird”: “If I had never seen Janet Bonney reenact the mouth-to-beak resuscitation of her hen Number Seven, who had been frozen solid in a nor’easter, then was thawed and nursed back to life – being hand-fed and massaged as she watched doctor shows on TV – I might never have become a chicken person.” I read that opener, and I just kept going. Before I knew it, I’d devoured a whole article about chickens, and enjoyed every word.

Orleans makes writing look easy. The whole piece just seems to pour out, following its own logic. But there are descriptions that only Orelans can pull off. For example, here she is describing some mules at an auction: “a few dozen yearlings, still wide-eyed and whiskery; a score of experienced teams, with high-gloss rumps and bunchy muscles; dozens of riding mules, their ears waggling as they trotted around the stockyard ring.” I love that “high-gloss rumps and bunchy muscles.” Nabokov couldn’t have written it any better. Here’s another example: “Next in the ring was a chestnut mule with a bristling blonde mane and the sleepy, watchful gaze of a bank guard.” Orlean’s piece is endlessly quotable.

Another great thing about Orlean’s work is that it’s true journalism. She goes to interesting places, observes what’s happening, and writes interestingly about it. When, in “Riding High,” she says, “Last year, I went to the Reese Brothers’ November auction, and sat in the auctioneer’s booth with Dickie Reese and J. B. Driver, the auctioneer,” I think to myself, Hey this is cool! What a cool place to go! I find such sentences thrilling. I’m happy to be along with her. The same is true for a line like this: “I wandered around the stalls, the soft sounds of snuffling and chewing and the occasional thump of a hoof as it hit the wood floor filling the air, and then made my way over to the auction ring.” This is reality, “the thing itself,” as Updike would say. And it just goes to show that you don’t have to go to Tehran or Moscow and meet with dictators in order to write an interesting piece. A trip to Dickson, Tennessee, to see a mule auction is just the ticket, thank you very much. Orleans without end, amen!