Jennifer Wilson on Susan Orlean's "Orchid Fever"

In high school, I waited tables on weekends at a restaurant in the tony Chestnut Hill section of Philadelphia, where framed covers of The New Yorker hung on the walls. That’s how I first encountered the magazine, and so I associated it with the moneyed clientele of genteel tastes who ordered items then exotic to me: ricotta blintzes, croque-monsieurs, frittatas.

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Then, one night, I went to see “Adaptation,” a new movie that was playing at one of the art-house theatres downtown. I vaguely recall a friend describing it as “meta”—superlative praise for a moody teen. The movie is, in part, about the labor pains of its creator, the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman had been hired to adapt “The Orchid Thief,” a book by Susan Orlean based on her New Yorker profile of an orchid poacher. Feeling stuck, Kaufman wrote himself into the script. In the movie, Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) complains to his agent, “I can’t structure this. It’s that sprawling New Yorker shit.” Kaufman, and Cage as Kaufman, also made Orlean’s interactions with the flower snatcher, John Laroche—a genius in Florida redneck clothing (Mylar wraparound sunglasses, tropical T-shirt, etc.)—a subplot.