There There (2018) has found its way onto several prominent end of year lists, which makes me feel quite au courant in this entry in Reading Well.
It’s Tommy Orange‘s debut novel, and speaks–from about a dozen different perspectives–to the contemporary and urban experience of a cross-section of Native Americans in and around Oakland (some are from other Western states, but all are converging towards Northern California).
What is most striking is Orange’s insistence on wrestling with the always-challenging notion of Indian identity within a contemporary, post/modern context. The teenagers are lost online, the adults are puzzled by this behavior, the discoveries of shared ancestry are facilitated by Facebook, traditional dance is learned from YouTube.
And little of the contemporary world helps: the outlook for Native communities, whether on or off government declared reservation boundaries, is bleakly complicated. And the questions of what it means to be Indian have certainly not grown simpler over the decades.
The plot is inevitably violent, building towards a confrontation at an event known is The Big Oakland Powwow, and there is something akin to terror in watching it slowly unfurl. But Orange manages that with a deep humanity in his characters, and by nicely capturing the range of experiences they present, both in terms of their levels of allegiance and interest in their cultural roots and in their abilities and opportunities in navigating the obstacles common to the economically disenfranchised in contemporary America.
The novel also manages to nimbly, and without comment, avoid cliché. There are no magical saviors here, no deep fountain of wisdom accessible only to those deemed closer to the Earth. That he does that while still weaving an ending that echos quite palpably with historical massacres and strategies of resistance is startling and powerful.
The range of voices and the inter-relatedness of the characters can be challenging to track at times, and perhaps a few of the perspectives are too similar to cleanly differentiate their voices in the reader’s mind. Still, an impressive debut, with some powerful moments.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
The multi-perspective thing is really appealing in a ton of ways, but I struggle with–shock of shocks–the plot skills that are required to pull it off. It’s not just different characters, it’s different characters that are converging and overlapping and interacting around a central sequence of events.
Also, Orange gives a great shout-out to one of my favorite discoveries of the past few years, the hip hop collective known as A Tribe Called Red, which brings Native musical traditions into direct conversation with hip hop and EDM to great effect.