Tommy Orange, _Wandering Stars_

 IT TOOK ME a while to start appreciating this book. It happened on p. 221, when a couple of the characters are talking about Donnie Darko.

     "What about the sequel?"

     "It was really bad. Like, we couldn't even finish it."

     "That bad?"

     "I think most sequels are bad."

     "Yeah, I think they are."

I think I laughed out loud at the point. Since Wandering Stars is a sequel to Orange's 2018 novel There There, the conversation struck me as an inspired metafictional wink to the reader, Orange letting us know that he knows that there is nothing easy about what he is trying to pull off.

Wandering Stars follows the example of one of cinema's most successful sequels, The Godfather, Part II, in being set both before and after the events of There There. The twelve chapters of Part One, "Before," present some of the ancestors of the Bear Shield and Red Feather families that we meet in There There; among those ancestors are survivors of the Sand Creek Massacre and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The ten chapters of Part Two, "Aftermath," show how Orvil Red Feather's being shot at the catastrophic conclusion of There There affects him, his brothers, his grandmother, and his great aunt. Two final chapters in Part Three, "Futures," take up how Orvil and his younger brother Lony have moved into adulthood.

The novel really began to engage me once it focused on Orvil and his brothers; a story took shape as the three young men struggled in their different ways to make sense of what had happened to their family. While I was reading Part Two, Part One retrospectively gained meaning, as I began to see that the family had been living for generations with attempts to erase them and their culture, first through literal murder, then through "education" and addictive substances. Against all odds, though, the family survived.

Orange writes as brilliantly as he did in There There. He again varies the narration--sometimes first person, sometimes close third, occasionally second--and there is a lyricism, too, that I don't remember noticing in There There, suggesting a reality behind appearances that unites the generations, even though the Red Feather brothers have no information about ancestors like Jude Star or Opal Viola Bear Shield. 

Wandering Stars reminded me a bit of Dara Horn's People Love Dead Jews. Horn takes up the irony that a large audience exists for stories in which the reader or viewer identifies with Jews who were killed or driven away or are in some way long gone--Anne Frank, Maus, Fiddler on the  Roof--but a lot of the same folk find the presence of living, here-and-now Jews just a bit discomfiting. Similarly, Wandering Stars takes up the irony that romanticizations of the vanished indigenous way of life can be very popular--e.g., Dancing with Wolves--but living, here-and-now indigenous peoples still have to resist marginalization, incomprehension, and erasure.