Book Review: There, There

By Tommy Orange

• Pub Date: 2019

• Genre: Native American Fiction

• Where I bought this book: The Newsouth Bookstore, Montgomery, Ala. 

• Why I bought this book: I was pondering if I should buy his second novel, Wandering Stars, when my wife told me this one, his first, was much better  

 *****

 

  This debut novel, dealing with the urban lives of several Native Americans in Oakland, Calif., has a lot going for it, but in the end, it's a disappointment.

    Oh, the writing is vivid. The individual stories are well told and compelling. Orange gets into their heads, describing their fitful experiences living life on the edge. 

    This is not a tale for white people who see Indians as stoic and spiritual, as more natural and earthbound. These are urban Indians, with problems like trauma, addiction, boredom, loneliness, and isolation.

    The anger and resentment they live and express for the treatment of the Indigenous population -- and the continuing negative effects of that -- comes out loud and clear. I weep for them and for the abuse and scorn and hatred we heaped, and continue to heap, on them.

    But, much like the Gertrude Stein quotation that gives the book its title, the overriding theme gets lost in the details. The character studies are wonderful. But they never coalesce into a whole. They drift in and out of the tales, and their connections with each other get lost amid the confusion.

    Maybe that is the point. Maybe it's me who doesn't understand. But I can see what make the characters tick -- and what they are ticked about -- but feel lost trying to follow what the story is ticking about.

    The book explores the histories and biographies of the various Indian characters, most of whom have tribal or familial relationships. It does so in successive chapters, sometimes following the characters. showing new experiences or bonds. It leads up to, and climaxes during, something called the Big Oakland Powwow.

     Too many make it hard to keeps up with who is who, and if their memories collide with  their actual experiences. There's no single protagonist or antagonist. There is a cast of characters list at the beginning, and it's useful, but it often means having to flip back and forth to determine the changes in relationship. 

    And the ending is a mishmash of those experiences that, once again, tell individual stories well but miss the full picture of what happened,