A dark thriller set mainly in GLASGOW
Novel set in Oakland (“..a tour de force…a wonderful thing…”)
26th September 2018
There There by Tommy Orange, novel set in Oakland, California.
Tommy Orange’s debut novel is a tour de force; it is that wonderful thing – a novel that is complex and written with immense skill from first word to last, a novel that that entertains and challenges, that at times makes you laugh, then reduces you to tears and that finally has you holding your breath as you approach the ending.
There There focuses on the lives of a group of Native Americans, or Indians, as they call themselves, determined to reclaim that term from its derogatory history. These are contemporary Indians, living messy, modern and complicated lives. Initially, there seems little connection between these different people apart from a shared sense of what they have lost, that and the fact that they are all headed for the big Oakland Powwow.
Jacqui Red Feather and her sister Opal endured a very painful childhood together but became separated as adults. Jacqui has spent most of her adult life in an alcoholic stupor but is now newly sober and intent on finding the family she lost so long ago. Opal is going to the powwow because her grandson, Orvil, is part of the ceremonial dancing display. Poor, isolated Edwin Black is headed there because he knows his biological father will be commentating. Dene Oxendene wants to honour his uncle’s death and has been collecting stories from Indians about their lives and intends recording as many stories as possible at the powwow. The darkest character is Tony Loneman, a victim of foetal alcohol syndrome (and incidentally one of the most powerful portrayals in the novel), who is intent on robbing the event at gunpoint.
Without ever slipping into polemic, Orange, himself a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, manages to convey very clearly the immense wrongs done to the Indian people; he does this through the characters’ poignant stories but also cleverly through the witty prologue that, in nine brief pages, summarises their history. It is given to us in such a matter-of-fact way that, inevitably, the reader is left holding feelings of loss, devastation and outrage. And yet There There is not the grim read that it might sound from this for there is humanity, compassion and bravery running through this narrative and, at the end, Orange manages to give us the sense that there is hope that these good values will win through. And there are wonderfully clever little flashes of humour, such as when Orange writes about how Indians have been defined by everyone else – he cites “Kevin Costner saving us, John Wayne slaying us (and) an Italian guy named Iron Eyes Cody playing our parts in movies”.
The intriguing title of the novel is taken from Gertrude Stein’s comment “there is no there there” about Oakland, where she grew up. Orange has taken her words and given them to Dene Oxendene as he muses, “the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone … it’s what happened to Native people.” This brilliant first novel goes some way to helping the reader understand the impact of this loss and left this reader wanting to know more about it.
This is without doubt the best thing I have read this year and I can’t wait to see what Tommy Orange gives us next.
Ellen for the TripFiction Team
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Terrific review, what a review should be, clear and not about the reviewer which often it is, gives the potential reader a taste for characters, setting, theme. Definitely going to read There There thanks to review, thanks TripFiction.