Tommy Orange's There There

            My son Matt was enlisted to write a piece on Tommy Orange’s There There for the forum section of PMLA, and he asked the family to read the book and tell him what we thought about it. So between Christmas and New Year’s we all sat down in the living room and talked about the book for two hours. We talk about books often, but this time everyone had read the same book recently and could get down to nitty-gritty detail. Everyone liked the book, though several quibbled about some things—the ending, for example—and opinions differed about why Orange chose to begin with a nonfictional prologue—an essay, really—about the distortion, stereotyping, and erasure of the Indians in American culture. I hope we helped Matt think about the book; you can read the result in the Spring 2020 issue of PMLA.

            Tommy Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, and his first book, There There (2018) is a polyphonic novel about Oakland’s urban Indians and what it’s like to be Indian or half-Indian in a 21^st-century American city. On some of his characters the past weighs heavily, while many of the kids seem to long for their unknown history or for some grounding other than the streets of Oakland. Orange introduces more than a dozen characters through first and third person narration, none of them, as Colm Toibin points out in his New York Times review of the book, “fully sure how to look or act, how to live or be.” Then the author begins to connect these characters before they all converge for a powwow at Oakland’s Coliseum.

            Just before all hell breaks loose at the powwow, Edwin Black stands awkwardly in front of his father Harvey, whom Edwin has never met but has located on the internet using hints dropped by his mother. Next to Edwin stands Blue, who has just realized that the woman sitting next to Harvey is her mother, whom she has never met but whose name, Jacquie Red Feather, was told her by her adoptive mother, to whom Jacquie gave her newborn daughter. The reader knows what no one of this foursome knows: Harvey is also Blue’s father. This tableau seems like a synecdoche for all the relationships in the novel that are wished for, just missed, absent, or walked away from.

            Oakland itself is a character in the book: the bay, the Coliseum, East and West Oakland, and a side trip to Alcatraz during the occupation of the island by Native Americans in the early 70s. Orange’s title comes, not from the Radiohead song “There There,” though the song is mentioned in the book, but from Gertrude Stein’s comment about her disillusionment at revisiting the rural Oakland she knew as a child: “there is no there there.”

            Many of Orange’s characters are involved in drug and alcohol abuse, though he avoids direct representation of suicide, which claims appalling numbers on reservations and in cities; instead, a counselor talks about how the efforts of counselors like himself have not managed to lessen the suicide rate among Native Americans, and in a brief description Jacquie Red Feather recalls seeing the body of her second daughter, the one she kept, after the girl’s suicide. One of the most poignant moments is when we learn that Jacquie Red Feather’s grandson Orvil has learned to do native dances not from a friend or relative—he knows no one who might teach him—but from the internet. The book is sad, but moves toward affirmation in the powwow at the end. When violence erupts there, Opal Viola Victoria Bearshield, Jacquie Red Feather’s sister, has a fleeting thought: they’ve come for us even here? But the ironic truth is that the kids who come to rob the powwow are Indians themselves.

            We didn’t come to a consensus about whether the book was primarily about Indians in America, specifically about what the urban situation does to culture, or just more broadly about all of us. We did decide that we ought to be reading more books that we could all talk about when we get together.