1. Plot

2. Themes

3. Reception
    Sales 

4. See also

5. Notes

6. References

7. Further reading

8. External links

There There is the first novel by Cheyenne and Arapaho author Tommy Orange. Published in 2018, it opens with an essay by Orange as a prologue, and then proceeds to follow a large cast of Native Americans living in the area of Oakland, California, as they struggle with a wide array of challenges ranging from depression and alcoholism, to unemployment, fetal alcohol syndrome, and the challenges of living with an ethnic identity of being "ambiguously nonwhite." All coalesce at a community pow wow and its attempted robbery.

The book explores the themes of Native peoples living in urban spaces, and issues of ambivalence and complexity related to Natives' struggles with identity and authenticity. There There was favorably received, and was the subject of a number of positive reviews.

Plot

The book begins with an essay by Orange, detailing "brief and jarring vignettes revealing the violence and genocide that indigenous people have endured, and how it has been sanitized over the centuries."^[2]

As it continues into fiction, the novel alternates between second and third person perspectives, following 12 Native American characters in the area of Oakland, California.^[3][1]{{efn|So-called, "urban Indians"^[2]}} It examines one character, named Blue, with "heartbreaking empathy" as she describes how she initially remained with her abusive partner^[6] before finally leaving. Another, Thomas, who is an alcoholic and has lost his job working as a janitor, wrestles with a life lived suspended between his mother, who is white and his "one-thousand-percent Indian" father who is a medicine man.^[3] Orange writes:

You're from a people who took and took and took and took. And from a people taken. You're both and neither. In the bath, you'd stare at your brown arms against your white legs in the water and wonder what they were doing together on the same body, in the same bathtub.^[3]

Similar conflict continues variously throughout the novel's characters. A teenager, Orvil Red Feather, turns to Google in a search to answer "What does it mean to be a real Indian,"^[1] and in the mirror, wearing tribal regalia pulled from a closet, sees only "a fake, a copy, a boy playing dress-up".^[4] Calvin Johnson confronts his guilt at claiming to not be Native at all, admitting "Mostly I just feel like I'm from Oakland."^[1] Tony Loneman grapples with the fetal alcohol syndrome left him by his alcoholic mother, while Octavio Gomez remembers alcohol through the drunk driving accident that claimed his family, and Jacquie Red Feather faces sobriety from the perspective of a substance abuse counselor in the wake of her teenage daughter's suicide.^[1] One struggles with his place in society as "ambiguously nonwhite", while another "overweight and constipated, has a graduate degree in Native American literature but no job prospects — a living symbol of the moribund plight of Indian culture in the United States."^[5]

All storylines and characters eventually coalesce around a pow wow taking place at the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum, where some characters have smuggled in 3D printed handguns in an attempt to rob the event to repay drug debts.^[5][2]

Themes

Orange, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, was himself raised in the area of Oakland.

The title of the novel (despite taking note of the song "There There", by English rock band Radiohead in the second chapter) is a reference to Gertrude Stein's own description, in her 1937 Everybody's Autobiography, of an attempt to return to her childhood home in Oakland but finding that the rural Oakland she remembered was gone: "There is no there there".^[6][2] For Native people, Orange writes, cities and towns represent "buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there."^[6]

Alcatraz Island and its prison also serves as a theme: a desolate institution that had no running fresh water and no electricity; these conditions were used as an example to the conditions that many urban Native American reservations were living in.

Writing in the New York Times, Alexandra Alter described the book in terms of ambivalence and complexity, quoting Orange, himself a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts, born to a Cheyenne father and white mother who converted to evangelical Christianity and denounced his father's spiritual beliefs, "I wanted to have my characters struggle in the way that I struggled, and the way that I see other native people struggle, with identity and with authenticity."^[6]

Reception

Canadian writer Margaret Atwood praised the work as "an astonishing literary debut".^[12] Egyptian-Canadian novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad wrote:

There There is a miraculous achievement, a book that wields ferocious honesty and originality in service of telling a story that needs to be told. This is a novel about what it means to inhabit a land both yours and stolen from you, to simultaneously contend with the weight of belonging and unbelonging. There is an organic power to this book—a revelatory, controlled chaos. Tommy Orange writes the way a storm makes landfall.^[13]

Speaking of the opening essay of the book, The Washington Post described it as "white-hot", as Orange "rifles through our national storehouse of atrocities and slurs", in a piece they beg not be passed over when compiling the year's list of "The Best American Essays".^[5] The San Francisco Chronicle described the prologue as "so searing that it set off a four-day publisher bidding war for reasons that are immediately apparent."^[1] Orange described his prologue as "a prayer from hell" in an interview with Buzzfeed, who for their own part, summarized it as "a sort of urban Native manifesto, a mini history, a prologue so good it leaves the reader feeling woozy, or concussed."^[14]

Sales

See also

• Sherman Alexie, Spokane-Coeur d'Alene-American novelist, short story writer, poet, and filmmaker
• Layli Long Soldier, an Oglala Lakota poet, writer and artist
• Louise Erdrich, American author of novels, poetry, and children's books featuring Native American characters and settings
• Terese Marie Mailhot, a First Nation Canadian writer, journalist, memoirist, and teacher
• List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas

Notes

References

Further reading

• [https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/03/26/the-state The State], a chapter from There There, published March 26, 2018, in The New Yorker, including audio as read by Tommy Orange
• [https://www.newyorker.com/books/this-week-in-fiction/fiction-this-week-tommy-orange-2018-03-26 Interview with Tommy Orange], published March 19, 2018, in The New Yorker
• [https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/tommy-orange/there-there-Orange/ Book Review of There There] published March 20, 2018, by Kirkus Reviews
• Thanksgiving is a tradition. It's also a lie Op-ed by Tommy Orange, published in the Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2017

External links

• {{cite web |last1=Neary |first1=Lynn |title=Tommy Orange's 'There There' Has A Wide Cast Of Native American Characters (audio) |url=https://www.npr.org/2018/06/07/617799798/tommy-oranges-there-there-has-a-wide-cast-of-native-american-characters |website=National Public Radio |accessdate=7 June 2018 |date=June 7, 2018|authorlink=Lynn Neary}}
• {{cite web |last1=Orange |first1=Tommy |title=A letter from Tommy Orange, author of There There |url=https://www.goldsborobooks.com/article/a-letter-from-tommy-orange-author-of-there-there |website=Goldboro Books |accessdate=9 August 2018 |date=June 19, 2018}}

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