If Susan Orlean has a writing style, it revolves around lists. Her book The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup is a collection of almost 15 years worth of personality profiles, mostly written for The New Yorker, and in its 19 feature-length articles and 16 "Talk Of The Town" featurettes, there are approximately 35 passages wherein Orlean starts listing. She runs down the merchandise at a New York street festival, the headlines of a small-town newspaper, the topics of discussion at an upscale beauty salon, the items available for purchase from the Tonya Harding fan club (as well as the restaurants in the food court by the mall skating rink where Harding practices), the agenda of a Maui surfer-girl slumber party, the public appearances of a tribal king who moonlights as a cab driver, and what her life would be like if she were married to a 10-year-old boy. Orlean can be as whimsical as her submersion into pre-teen suburban life in "The American Man, Age Ten," or as evocative as her story of a road trip with the gospel troupe The Jackson Southernaires in "Devotion Road." She can be as humorous as her attempts to probe the secrets of a novelty-chair manufacturer in "Big," or as brittle as her exposé of a budding teen-pop queen in "Tiffany." As in her book-length works of reportage Saturday Night and The Orchid Thief, Orlean's shorter works are often bracingly personal, as the author shifts from aloof descriptions of the communities she visits and the people she meets to more subjective admissions of how she feels at any given moment. Her version of personality journalism doesn't dwell on exhaustive, subject-from-birth-to-now history, and it isn't the "I had lunch with Bill Blass" inside-look type, either. What Orlean does is assemble the asides, the overheard comments, and the anecdotes that came up while she was working on the piece, and she presents those as the piece itself, while carefully avoiding offering any overt assertion of what these excerpts from her notebook might collectively mean. Read back-to-front—from the introduction where Orlean explains why she became a writer to the concluding title story, a journey to Spain to meet a female matador—The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup suggests a collective meaning of its own. That something interesting might happen to a real-estate agent as often as to a tennis pro is part of what Orlean is getting at. The rest has to do with her gift for keeping track of her days and presenting their highlights, one after another.