“Powerful. . . . a revelation.” —The New York Times “With a literary authority rare in a debut novel, it places Native American voices front and center before readers’ eyes.” —NPR/Fresh Air One of The New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year and winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award, Tommy Orange’s wondrous and shattering bestselling novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all … follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle’s death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American—grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.
One of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, GQ, Entertainment Weekly, BuzzFeed, San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Globe
more
Tommy Orange weaves a fascinating and powerful story, creating a cast of well-rounded characters and shining a (deservedly) harsh light on American History’s failure to represent the truth in textbooks and classrooms. In school, we were fed quaint tales of Thanksgiving and Columbus Day—feel-good examples of symbiotic friendships. However, the more we dig and learn, the greater our understanding that these stories were blatant propaganda, spun to justify plunder and to ease guilt for mistreatment of rich and vital cultures. It’s time to correct history, and, as uncomfortable as it may be for us, it’s time to be silent so we can listen to stories we’ve not yet heard.
SO well written. SO depressing. I understand life can be like that, but when I read fiction I want uplifting, and I felt all of these characters – whose lives were so bleak in many ways – had no hope.
Set in Oakland, California, all fates converge in the horrific open-ended conclusion at the Oakland Powwow. Told in first person and third person points of view, brief vignettes focus on twelve Native characters whose lives become irrevocably changed49. As in most Native stories, the characters are beset by familial and societal problems: alcohol, drugs, unemploymnt, poverty, absent/neglectful mothers, unknown/absent fathers, depression, hopelessness, and lack of positive role models. This book has been awarded the PEN/Hemingway Award and the 2018 National Book Award Longlist-Fiction.
Significance of the title? “There there” is a phrase commonly used to calm and comfort. In the political arena, the absence of there there becomes “no there there” which means there is no veracity or substance in the event or person being analyzed. This phrase comes from the author Gertrude Stein who was devasted upon re-visiting her childhood home with nostalgic sentiments, only to find her home in Oakland, California gone and the neighborhood razed to make room for modern improvements. “There’s no there, there,” Gertrde Stein sighed.
Tommy Orange tells us that for Native people, “Cities and towns represent ‘buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.’ ”
The Massacre as Prologue section contains a disturbing account. I found verification of the massacre but not evidence of Colonel Chivington’s defense. A Protestant Methodist minister, John Chivington, leader of a volunteer militia, maintains that on November 29, 1864 the Native people started the shooting, killing and maiming 49 of his men, so they were fully aware that there would be consequences to their actions. Chivington never denied the accusations. Tommy Orange’s notes: “Some of us grew up with stories about massacres. Stories about what happened to our people not so long ago. How we came out of it. At Sand Creek, we heard it said that they mowed us down with their howitzers. Volunteer militia under Colonel John Chivington came to kill us—we were mostly women, children, and elders.The men were away to hunt. They’d told us to fly the American flag. We flew that and a white flag too. Surrender the white flag waved. We stood under both flags as they came at us. They did more than kill us. They tore us up. Mutilated us. Broke our fingers to take our rings, cut off our ears to take our silver, scalped us for our hair. We hid in the hollows of tree trunks, buried ourselves in sand by the riverbank. That same sand ran red with blood. They tore unborn babies out of bellies, took what we intended to be, our children before they were children, babies before they were babies, they ripped them out of our bellies. They broke soft baby heads against trees. Then they took our body parts as trophies and displayed them on a stage in downtown Denver. Colonel Chivington danced with dismembered parts of us in his hands, with women’s pubic hair, drunk, he danced, and the crowd gathered there before him was all the worse for cheering and laughing along with him. It was a celebration.”
Colonel Chivington was reprimanded by the American government but no penalties were inflicted. War, whether declared or undeclared, is a scourge of humanity. I held my breath while reading this account. My head pounded. Actions such as described above are unconscionable. The saddest part of this for me, is that the accusations are true. It happened.
Getting back to the book, it starts out strong and well-written but it changes in later chapters. Emotional involvement with the characters is barely established. Some chapters left me wondering as to their importance as a vehicle to show character and/or their contribution to the story as a whole. All in all, this is an important look into the psyches of a group of people who find it difficult or even impossible to assimilate and blend into American culture. The Native culture is cemented in history but some members of this group are hard-pressed to allow themselves to accept the culture in which they now find themselves.
Could not stop thinking about it!
Plotting, characters, and setting all terrific.
Headline: Confused, disjointed, and pointless (but at times beautiful)
Tommy Orange’s novel, There There, has received accolades for its originality and how it provides an insight into Native American urban life. All of that is true, but the book has many flaws, so be careful diving in with high expectations about the quality of the writing, the logic of the story, or having a fulfilling conclusion.
The novel features many characters. One is Dene Oxendene, an aspiring Native American filmmaker working on a project in which he asks urban Natives in Oakland to sit in front of his camera and tell their stories – stories about how hard their lives have been. The putative film has no particular structure, plot, or end-goal – he’s going to let the stories speak for themselves and allow the subjects to dictate the plot. This novel is very much the same; it’s a series of vignettes depicting the lives and travails of a cast of seemingly random Native Americans living in Oakland, with no obvious plot, theme, or purpose (until the very end). There is some beautiful writing here, and some interesting and deeply troubled characters, but in the end it is a difficult book to read, hard to follow, and lacking in coherence and ultimately in any point aside from documenting how hard it is to be a Native in Oakland.
The author begins with a series of notes about the historically terrible treatment Native Americans received from the White man. Massacres, disease, relocation, oppression, and broken promises. The Natives have received a raw deal. Not a particularly engaging beginning for the non-Native reader. Then, Mr. Orange introduces us to Tony Loneman, a young Native man living with the mental and physical after effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrom (the “drome” he calls it) because his mother was a drunk. After spending the opening chapter getting to know (a little bit) Tony, the author moves on to a different character and it turns out that Tony has very little to do with the story and we seldom see him again. The point of the first chapter is never apparent, and Tony’s “drome” is never again mentioned. This is indicative of the confusion and lack of coherence in this book.
If you are stubborn about wanting to read the whole novel, my advice is that you start off with a pad and pencil so that you can make notes about the names of the characters and you can make a timeline and draw a relationship chart that will enable you to try to keep straight who’s related to whom and where you heard about the characters during the earlier (unnumbered) chapters. You’ll need to cross out or erase some information as you go along, but it’s your only hope of making sense of how the individual stories (chapters) relate to each other. The first section of the book (Remain) consists of four short peeks into the lives of four characters (and their friends and family), none of which seem to have any relationship to any of the others. The only common thread is that they are all Natives, they all live in Oakland, and there is an upcoming powwow gathering of Natives in which they all are interested. The second section (Reclaim) introduces four new characters whose stories are similarly not connected to the first four, then the author gives us a second look at the first four, making a total of eight “main” players that the reader must try to track. Part three (Return) has four new characters acting as the main voice/perspective of a chapter, although all of them were at least mentioned peripherally in earlier chapters.
As you push through the later sections of the book (and at times it is a slog), the author eventually doles out bits of information that start to become individual threads of a spider’s web of connections and junctions that link the characters together. The author does not make it easy. Some of the chapters depict events from the distant past, but the reader has to figure that out – and sometimes it’s not obvious until many chapters later. Several chapters are out of linear sequence, covering ground already tread by other characters in earlier chapters, but again the author does not make that obvious, so the reader has to put the jigsaw puzzle together. The interrelationships between the characters becomes so complicated that without an organizational chart, it’s frustratingly difficult to decipher.
Along the way there are multiple images that I guess are intended to be metaphors. These are mostly disconnected episodes that have no significance to the ultimate story line, and often include the introduction and discarding of characters who play no important role. Some of these portions of the book have delightful imagery and carefully crafted prose, making it more like an epic poem than a novel. Some of the gritty dialogue is also well-written and engaging on a scene-by-scene basis. But, ultimately the individual scenes don’t make a compelling story. (I still don’t understand the references to the spider’s legs that two characters pull out from diseased boils on their legs. The author must think the spider’s legs have a metaphorical meaning, but it’s beyond me.)
There is no book blurb or synopsis on the book’s amazon sale page, which is strange. What you see are glowing reviews from The New York Times, the Washington Post, and others. The potential reader gets no information about the book from the author. So, if you’re waiting for an inspiring tale about Native Americans overcoming their difficult environment, you will be very disappointed. In fact, the book reinforces a lot of negative stereotypes about Natives – lots of alcohol and drug abuse, crime, promiscuity, lack of family cohesiveness, and general despair, even while some people are trying to honor and keep alive the tribal traditions that are the core of the Native identity. But, the reality is bleak, as is most of the story.
The writing style and quality, like the plot, is all over the map. Some chapters are in first person present (usually a bad idea, and here no exception), some in third person past, and even one chapter in second person present tense (unique for sure, but distraction). The editing is quite good, and at times the prose is lovely and elegantly descriptive. If there were a better plot and a more coherent story, these sections would read like Hemingway. But, as written, the beautiful words serve only to emphasize the absence of a story.
In the end (without spoiling), the characters all end up at the big Oakland powwow, where there is a climactic scene, told in very short chapters from the various perspectives of the many characters. This portion of the story is exciting and engaging (with one huge bungle – see below in the spoiler section), but even that leaves the reader in the end without a sense of the purpose of the story or even closure about the outcome. Perhaps that was the author’s point—that there is no closure and no purpose and we are all just feathers floating on the winds of fate. If that’s the point, then this is a very difficult road to put the reader through in order to get there. By the end, I was sorry I started the journey.
This is a commendable attempt at a first novel that is no doubt semi-autobiographical. I read it as a book club selection with no prior knowledge or preconceptions. In that light, it’s an interesting read of a deeply flawed novel and I’d give the author encouragement for his next effort, which hopefully will be better structured and more coherent. But, if you go into this read with high expectations based on the glowing reviews and accolades, you are likely to be very disappointed and frustrated.
Unforgettable, beautifully written, multigenerational story about the strength and despair woven into the linked history of thirteen people in California’s Native community.
Really enjoyed the book. It involves the lives of Native Americans in the Oakland area and the big Oakland pow wow. Much of this book intrigued me. I for one really felt and understood the alcoholic and drug addiction consequences. There were a few parts of the book that didn’t interest me but all in all a terrific read.
There There was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Native Americans live in Oakland and it follows their struggles with alcoholism, absent parents, and horrible discrimination because they are non-white and their culture seems not to matter to anyone.
This book is a well-written story that culminates at a huge PowWow that is about to be robbed.
I can’t say enough about its superior quality.
Loved this.
A rambling, kaleidoscopic dream of a book full of memorable language and characters.
This novel earns the words critics ascribe to it, words like searing, authentic, surprising, challenging, disturbing. There is a sense of foreboding that builds throughout, leading to a denouement that seems both inevitable and supremely unnecessary. Orange’s chapters are centered on twelve characters, who we meet at various times in their lives; as the story unfolds we learn the interconnections between these people. He immerses us in this community, using tropes of Native American life, urban poverty, racism and economic imperialism to illustrate the glory and the meanness of their lives. Here is the Urban Indian, Orange asserts. See us. Know us. These Indians’ pride of place is Oakland, not the reservation, but they are being displaced. At the end of the book Orange leaves us unresolved; we don’t know the outcomes for many of the characters, only that the life of the Urban Indian is full of disasters, large or small. What continuity there is comes from the women, as the men both young and old succumb to alcohol, pride, fear and greed.
The writing is immediate, rooted deeply in the experiences of the characters. Orange builds the web of relationships as much through what is left out as what is written. I admire this discipline, to keep the words focused on what is essential. The reader needs to work to have empathy; we are as much the perpetrator of each character’s pain as the observer. Orange does provide us with a long prologue, and an interlude, in which he defines some of the terms and circumstances that his characters face. This educates us but also provides a bit of relief from the socially restricted and often brutal lives of the characters. This is an important book, one in which intersectionality is a driver in the character’s lives, presented undeniably and without artifice. Bravo. The disquiet I feel is going to remain with me for some time. Hooray for fiction!
Incredible voices and characters. I learned so much I am ashamed to say. But that is the wonderful thing about books, I was transported to Oakland, to a Pow Wow, into the hearts and minds of ten point of view characters…. This book is different than many I’ve read, really well-done.
This is a confusing book with a lot of characters, which is not to say it is bad. If you read it, keep track of the characters, it will be easier.
Over 90% of the book, the reader is introduced and then reconnected with many characters. Almost all are Native Americans who live in Oakland, Calif or connected to people who do. Eventually all end up at a Powwow in Oakland. Over the course of the book you learn a lot about the lives of Native Americans and especially the “Urban Indian.” The book keeps returning to the same characters as their lives evolve.
I found it depressing and sad and still interesting.
What a terrific voice! The characters, their predicaments, the setting, the tense convergence of different lives in a looming disaster. It’s all so terrific. There are way too many characters, which I think diminishes the dramatic impact of the denouement, and makes it sort of hard to follow at times. And although those might seem like major problems, they’re somehow not; it’s still a great book.
This is an amazing book. Beautiful writing, providing an intense depiction of life in the Native American community. Very real, and very discomforting.
The true natural of the theme is gut wrenching. It deals with an almost invisible underrepresented disenfranchised group , the urban Indian.But the issues need more exposure to effect some changes. Ya need a strong stomach.
disappointing
The writer shares the pain of being stranded in the land once owned by his people and the difficulty in surviving such circumstance the last page was magnificent when he sacrifices himself for another what could be more noble
There There was a great book for me on so many levels. It deals with issues of gentrification and personal identity. I really appreciated that the author gives a different narrator for each chapter. To me, it validated that there are a lot of ways of being an American Indian. I really appreciate authors such as Orange and Erdrich who examine the complexities of that dynamic. I also appreciated that those characters most connected to their culture were those that had the highest stakes at the end, and were most at risk, which is very realistic both historically and currently.
I very much enjoyed this book about Urban Native American life in Oakland, California. The writing was electric, and the story moved quickly and held my interest. I found the structure a little difficult, as I had to keep looking back to see who the characters were because there were so many and they had so many interconnections. But overall, definitely worth reading.