Book Review of There There by Tommy Orange

There There

by Tommy Orangish

Here'southward the thing almost There There, the debut novel by Native American author Tommy Orangish: Fifty-fifty if the rest of its story were merely so-so — and it's much more than that — the novel's prologue would brand this book worth reading.

In that 10-page prologue, Orange wittily and witheringly riffs on some 500 years of native people's history, a history of genocide and dislocation presented more often than not through the image of heads. He begins with a clarification of the "Indian Head test pattern," a graphic that closed out America's television programming every night during the age of black-and-white TV. He then catapults backwards to 1621 and the start Thanksgiving, then bebops through a litany of Indian massacres in American history.

Hither's part of that prologue where Orange momentarily catches his jiff and sums upward:

Our heads are on flags, jerseys, and coins. Our heads were on the penny kickoff, of class, the Indian cent, and then on the buffalo nickel, both before nosotros could even vote every bit a people — which, similar the truth of what happened in history all over the earth, and similar all that spilled blood from slaughter, are now out of circulation.

In his prologue and in other inspired digressions throughout this novel, Orange'southward writing reminds me of the late, slap-up Tom Wolfe — another exuberant, socially conscious prose poet who loved to get word-drunk simply never got sloppy.

There There is distinguished not only by Orange's crackling fashion, merely past its unusual subject. This is a novel about urban Indians, nigh native peoples who know, as he says, "the sound of the superhighway amend than [they] practise rivers ... the odor of gas and freshly moisture concrete and burned condom better than [they] do the aroma of cedar or sage..."

Orange'south story takes place in Oakland, Calif., and his title comes from the famous pronouncement about rootlessness that Gertrude Stein made when, equally an adult, she revisited Oakland, her childhood home. "There is no at that place at that place," Stein said.

Orange knows the feeling and the terrain: He likewise grew up in Oakland and is enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. But in There There, Orangish wanted to exercise something more fictionalize his ain experience. Instead, his novel is composed of the stories of a agglomeration of Native and mixed-race characters, all of them eventually converging in a climactic scene at a big confab in the Oakland Coliseum.

Nosotros readers know from the outset that something terrible will happen at that powwow the minute we meet our start character, 21-year-old Tony Loneman. Tony talks most struggles with the "Airport," meaning fetal booze syndrome, and is in with a bunch of lowlifes who've gotten a agree of iii-D printed plastic guns they're planning to use in a robbery at the powwow.

Other, more beneficial characters are drawn to the powwow for the same reasons that Americans of every race and ethnicity at present log onto sites similar Beginnings.com: They're searching for identity. That urge is especially strong in characters whose connection to their native heritage is more vexed, similar a young adult female named Blue, who was adopted at nascency by a white couple. She'due south what Orange calls in his prologue "an apple," significant "cherry-red on the outside and white on the inside."

The risk with this kind of chorus-line plot structure is that it can feel mechanical — as Orange'south novel sometimes does when it stalls in the company of the weaker characters here. Simply other voices and stories are so alive they more than recoup.

Main among the standouts is a woman named Opal Viola Victoria Conduct Shield whose background is as singular equally her proper name. As children, Opal and her older sister spent time with their female parent on Alcatraz, when that isle was occupied past Native American activists in 1969. In nowadays-time, Opal is now a postal worker, caring for her sister's three grandsons. All of them find themselves at that fateful powwow, which turns out to be as chaotic and idealistic every bit the Alcatraz occupation — and much more violent.

In a satiric aside, Orange says that one thing that unites the diverse powwow participants is the type of bumper stickers they've slapped on their cars: They all sport Indian pride messages like "My Other Vehicle Is a State of war Pony" and "Fighting Terrorism Since 1492."

Like those bumper stickers, At that place In that location is pithy and pointed. With a literary authority rare in a debut novel, it places Native American voices front and center before readers' optics.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2018/06/18/621011107/pithy-and-pointed-there-there-puts-native-american-voices-front-and-center

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