"My Kind of Place," by Susan Orlean

This originally appeared on page M-2 of the San Francisco Chronicle on October 17, 2004.

Been there, wrote of that: Sometimes the people are wilder than the places
"My Kind of Place," by Susan Orlean
Reviewed by Dewey Hammond


"Something about Khao San Road makes you feel as though it could eat you alive," writes Susan Orlean in "The Place to Disappear," one of the more than two dozen stories that make up "My Kind of Place: Travel Stories From a Woman Who's Been Everywhere." Bangkok's Khao San Road is the land of high-speed Internet access, cheap heroin, foreign bookstores and bootleg tapes of Earth, Wind and Fire being peddled alongside stolen Motorola pagers. One can practically taste the smell of stale beer in Orlean's account of the dangerous and magnetic alleyway that serves as the pit stop for wayward travelers bouncing around the Far East.

The variance of countries listed in the index of Orlean's most recent effort -- Bhutan, Cuba, France, Hungary, Scotland, Thailand and the United States -- may be impressive, but, at its core, "My Kind of Place" is equal parts human-interest narratives and traditional travel pieces. She drops by the World Taxidermy Championships in rural Illinois, shadows the manager of an independent grocer in Queens and hangs out an African music store -- the first of its kind locally -- in the heart of Paris. The people are often more important to Orlean than the places.

In "Madame President," the writer tags along with Tiffanie Lewis, president of Manhattan's Martin Luther King Jr. High School student government, as she presides over meetings where the kids are just as likely to order Chinese food and discuss poetry readings as they are to complain about the fact that the recent gang rape in a fifth-floor bathroom leaves students with only one remaining bathroom, because there is not enough staff to monitor more.

Orlean cut her journalistic teeth 25 years ago, writing for an alternative newsweekly in Portland, Ore., before moving on to Rolling Stone and the Village Voice, ultimately settling in Manhattan as a staff writer for the New Yorker in 1992, where she made a name for herself with "Orchid Fever," the story of an eccentric orchid guru arrested for poaching plants from a south Florida Indian-reservation swampland. The story gave birth to a best- selling book, "The Orchid Thief," which eventually made its way to the silver screen as "Adaptation." Orlean has a knack for creating illuminating profiles of otherwise ordinary people, and as the saying goes, if it ain't broke, she doesn't try to fix it. In "My Kind of Place," Orlean instead tweaks it, and the results are sometimes disappointing.

The book is divided into three sections of equal length: "Here," "There" and "Everywhere." "Here" and "There" recount the author's domestic and international travels, respectively, and both should be embraced with open enthusiasm. For weeks, she spent her days at Sunshine Market in Jackson Heights in Queens, N.Y., living and breathing the business that consumes owner Herb Spitzer and his staff. "Herb faced the little window that affords a view of the whole store. The lines at register three were three deep. Someone had just broken a ketchup bottle in Aisle 4." But Orlean loses focus in "Everywhere," a collection of writings that tests the patience of her readers and the limits of a book that promises travel stories in its very title.

Take "Homewrecker," for example. Orlean tells of declining a request from a friend that Orlean offer her Manhattan apartment as lodging for someone unknown to the author. The mystery person was Tina Turner. "I'm not crazy about sharing combs and brushes, but if Tina had just shampooed and had forgotten her own stuff," she writes in hindsight, "she would probably use them, even if I had specifically asked her not to." Even duller is "My Life: A Series of Performance Art Pieces." Using her family as a theaterlike cast, Orlean revisits her early years through a series of five vignettes. "I lower myself into a snowbank and wave my arms up and down, leaving a winged-creature- like impression upon the frozen palimpsest," she writes in "Coming Home Extremely Late Because I Was Making Snow Angels and Forgot to Stop."

Orlean does, however, strike gold with "Everywhere's" "We Just Up and Left," in which she chronicles life at Portland Meadows Mobile Home Park. "Residents in the park could not own a pet that weighed more than twenty pounds," she writes. "None of the Catman's cats weighed more than around ten, but if you added them together, they would probably have weighed close to a thousand." It's not that the other "Everywhere" stories wouldn't have a shelf life elsewhere -- even the snow-angel snoozer was published back in 1990 by the New Yorker -- but they feel out of place in "My Kind of Place," and they threaten to dampen an otherwise enjoyable collection.