Tommy Orange, _There There_

THE TITLE WORKS three different ways--an old-fashioned thing to say to comfort someone, part of a famous remark by Gertrude Stein about Oakland (where the novel is set), and a Radiohead song--and all three figure in the book, so readers may consider themselves notified that this is not an old-school straightforwardly naturalistic novel about Native American identity. (If the title does not do the trick, the epigraphs from Marias, Baldwin, and Genet should.)

The novel's point of view circulates: twelve different characters serve as focal point (sometimes in first person, sometimes in close third). This is a familiar device--A Visit from the Goon Squad and The Overstory are recent prize-winning examples--but we should probably note another predecessor, Louise Erdrich, name-checked in There There. As in most Erdrich novels, the narrators/focal characters in There There are all from among the continent's indigenous peoples; in Orange's novel, though, their relationships to the native community range from profound to barely existent. Furthermore, all live in Oakland, surrounded by the hum of contemporary urban America, far from reservation life or anything at all like their traditional cultures.

The novel, too, is a hybrid, not only for its multiplying of points of view but also for the inclusion of a couple of essayistic sections, "Prologue" at the beginning and "Interlude" midway, surveying the Native American situation from early encounters with European colonizers to the present. Not fictionalized at all and in a distinctly different voice, these sections inhabit a plane apart from that of the rest of the novel, yet even so entangled in it.

At the center of the plot is an Oakland pow-wow. Some of the characters are deeply involved in planning it, some just want to attend, a few see it as an opportunity to stage a robbery. If the pow-wow is somehow meant to be read as a synecdoche for the urban Native American communal identity (a collective effort to recognize itself, affirm itself, honor its cultural inheritance, forge solidarity for its future), one wonders why Orange turns it into such a violent disaster, and a disaster with so many dangling loose ends. Is Tony dead? Is Orvil alive? (Eight door swings--good?) Do Blue and Edwin ever find out they have the same father?

However--I don't mind being left at sixes and sevens by a novel's conclusion. I'm all about the ride.  There There was good one, and Orange is a find.