In Tommy Orange’s There There, an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life, on tradition all the more pressing because of its fragility, it is as if he seeks to reconfigure Oakland as a locus of desire and dreams, to remake the city in the likeness of his large and fascinating set of characters ... Orange makes Oakland into a 'there' that becomes all the more concretely, emphatically and fully so in a novel that deals, in tones that are sweeping and subtle, large-gestured and nuanced, with what the notion of belonging means for Native Americans ... The novel, then, is their picaresque journey, allowing for moments of pure soaring beauty to hit against the most mundane, for a sense of timelessness to be placed right beside a cleareyed version of the here and now, for a sense of vast dispossession to live beside day-to-day misery and poverty. Nothing in Orange’s world is simple, least of all his characters and his sense of the relationship between history and the present. Instead, a great deal is subtle and uncertain in this original and complex novel.
Everything about There There acknowledges a brutal legacy of subjugation — and shatters it. Even the book’s challenging structure is a performance of determined resistance. This is a work of fiction, but Orange opens with a white-hot essay. With the glide of a masterful stand-up comic and the depth of a seasoned historian, Orange rifles through our national storehouse of atrocities and slurs, alluding to figures from Col. John Chivington to John Wayne. References that initially seem disjointed soon twine into a rope on which the beads of American hatred are strung ... Orange makes little concession to distracted readers, but as the number of characters continues to grow we begin to grasp the web of connections between these people ... As these individual stories intersect, the plot accelerates until the novel explodes in a terrifying mess of violence. Technically, it’s a dazzling, cinematic climax played out in quick-cut, rotating points of view. But its greater impact is emotional: a final, sorrowful demonstration of the pathological effects of centuries of abuse and degradation.
Tommy Orange’s There There is one of those remarkable debuts that doesn’t come around too often: a groundbreaker. It’s a furious, eloquent, propulsive, multi-voiced portrait ... among Orange’s achievements in this powerful, polyphonic, 'hella sad' novel is to locate the missing 'there' — by painting a disturbing but compassionate picture of how historical displacement has reverberated in the lives of a group of descendents of indigenous Americans in contemporary Oakland ... With There There, Tommy Orange has certainly done his bit, not only keeping history alive but adding a significant new chapter to Native American literature.
There There has so much jangling energy and brings so much news from a distinct corner of American life that it’s a revelation in a way that’s reminiscent of the best of Alexie’s early work. In terms of sheer brio and promise, its appearance marks the passing of a generational baton ... The story Orange tells moves cinematically in its second half, sweeping up all that came before. To film it properly would require a Robert Altman, a director with an unorthodox sense of spectacle. It might also require a director willing to tinker with Orange’s expedient Grand Guignol ending, one less willing to simply burn the set down ... It’s the close-up work that puts this novel across, however, the quotidian details of blasted lives. That Orange manages to link these details to a historical sense of outrage at how America has treated its native people, in a manner that approaches scarifying essay without dropping over the fence into lecture or sociology, adds to this novel’s smoke ... Orange is especially interested in what cultural inheritance means, in how to carry your roots like a conscience, in what one needs to leave behind and what one needs to take ... There There has its soft spots. At times it veers toward the sentimental; it can lean too heavily on its themes. There are perhaps too many resonant generalities about the importance of storytelling. But the real stuff is here, a sense of life as it is lived, an awareness of the worm inside each bottle of mezcal.
Tommy Orange drags Indian identity into the 21st century with raw, electrifying immediacy ... Though their struggles aren’t necessarily new, they never feel less than real ... If anything, there’s too much intrigue here to truly do justice to them all, but what remains is the fierce drive 'to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive.' ”
... powerful ... These are stories of yearning and captivity, of neglect and repression – stories that search for redemption, all the while threatening regression. As a portrayal of native people, it is the most nuanced and illuminating I have seen ... The seemingly disparate tales are in fact quite cohesive. Just as we become rapt in one, we catch the gleam of another, and are thus led towards the book’s revealing ending. (I long to tell you what happens in this rapturous final scene at the powwow, but suffice to say you should go see the sorry spectacle for yourself) ... What’s ingenious about this book – a book about the Indian experience – is that it seems wary of capturing the Indian experience at all ... the book sits in its own uncertainty: grabs at the truth and misses. Which is perhaps just what it means to do: gesture towards the notion that people cannot be captured. And that’s as powerful a manifesto as any.
...[a] riveting debut novel ... The plot moves forward with incredible tension between these two forces of communion and destruction ... With There There, Orange is telling a story that refutes that racist history and that keeps his characters intact. They are not symbols but complex people ... With his electrifying and innovative first novel, Orange is re-engaging American history and re-invigorating the genre. There There is a novel like few others, innovative in form, its characters unforgettable. It is a masterpiece.
Even if the rest of its story were just so-so — and it's much more than that — the novel's prologue would make this book worth reading ... In his prologue and in other inspired digressions throughout this novel, Orange's writing reminds me of the late, great Tom Wolfe — another exuberant, socially conscious prose poet who loved to get word-drunk but never got sloppy ... There There is distinguished not only by Orange's crackling style, but by its unusual subject ... There There is pithy and pointed. With a literary authority rare in a debut novel, it places Native American voices front and center before readers' eyes.
Tommy Orange’s debut novel, There There, should probably be on reading lists for every creative writing program in this country. It is a master class in style, form and narrative voice. Orange, who is from the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, utilizes first, second and third-person narration to incredible effect, creating a multi-voiced novel that effectively reflects an entire community ... And unlike some male authors who think of their female characters as mere conduits for male desires or projections, Orange’s are rich and complex ... Whenever Orange sets his sights on colonialism and racism, his criticism is sharp and unrelenting.
...a startlingly ambitious and moving first novel ... It’s a mark of Orange’s talent that in a book with a dozen protagonists, each emerges as a fully realized person, with their own distinct ways of talking and seeing the world ... In a novel that is more layered than Sherman Alexie’s best fiction and in prose that is as lyrical and humane as Louise Erdrich’s, Orange brilliantly evokes the complexity of this 'new' community.
To lever his subjects into his harsh but mostly forgiving light, Orange leads somberly refulgent search parties of prose into every corner of the particular, Native American geography he has mapped of Oakland, with varied places, identities and epochs conspiring to inhabit its unfriendly earth, its perpetuation of drugs and drinking, its collusion with family fracturing and dysfunction, reaching back to an invading force’s first dissembling schemes for assimilation. It transforms such city signposts as Fruitvale and San Leandro Boulevard —and a fizzled occupation of Alcatraz—into well-worn topographical stops of sadness, anger, stubborn ceremony and wary joy. In spaces—actual and psychic—constructed to negate it, heroism is felt in the quick flashes Orange allows ... He exercises at least three narrative genres: history, fiction, and a filmic unspooling ... fiction of the highest order, landing it on the shores of a world that should be abashed it was unaware it had been awaiting his arrival.
...[a] speeding 16-wheeler of a debut novel ... The book opens with a searing prologue, an essay that grounds us in a history that’s been frequently obscured ... Again and again, Orange — whose prose is electric, alive, who holds sorrow and joy at once in the palm of his sentences — puts his characters in front of reflective surfaces ... stunning, symphonic.
The opening of Tommy Orange’s striking first novel forces that historical artefact into the reader’s vision, rhythmic repetition ensuring that there is no escape from recognition ... the reader has an awareness of an observing eye and listening ear as, in each chapter, different voices are heard ... There is hope in this book, hope in the strength of stories told and stories that are finally heard. Orange has no use for linguistic fireworks: his language is intimately plain and confiding. The wonder of this accomplished debut is the way in which he has got under his characters’ skins ... This is a powerful novel of pain and possibility.
A sorrowful, beautiful debut ... The brilliance of the book lies in what Orange does with this tension. With the plot device of the powwow holding the book together, he has the freedom to tell many different stories in many different voices ... The novel grants each character the gift of complexity. It is possible to love and to be selfish, to have a limp and to walk with a swagger. These people have been hurt by history but are capable of causing hurt too ... There There itself is a kind of dance. Even in its tragic details, it is lyrical and playful, shaking and shimmering with energy. The novel dips into the tiniest personal details and sweeps across history.
While anticipation of the powwow provides a baseline of suspense, the path Orange lights through these and his novel’s many other stories thrills on its own. Engrossing at its most granular, in characters’ thoughts and fleeting moments, There There introduces an exciting voice.
For the last 20 years, Native American literature has been dominated by two writers, Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich, who have concentrated on the reservation experience. Orange comes from a different generation and has a different perspective, funny and profane and conscious of the violence that runs like a scar through American culture.
...powerful ... Orange, a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, grew up as the son of a white mother and Cheyenne father in Oakland, Calif., and There There rises from questions about his own identity, faith, race and the social uncertainty facing what he refers to in the novel as 'Urban Indians'... It’s a varied, multifaceted cast, from a documentarian to an aging woman denying her heritage, from mothers of lost daughters to sons of missing fathers, from those seeking community at the powwow to a small group of thugs planning to rob it. Each character is introduced and developed with a clear-eyed fidelity, empathic without sentimentality, our understanding increasing as connections are revealed, histories explored, gaps filled in. At its core, There There is a novel about those gaps.
With his debut novel, There There, Tommy Orange interjects a voice that has been missing from the literary conversation ... The 12 tales unfold and overlap as each of Orange’s characters prepares for the Big Oakland Powwow to be held at the Oakland Coliseum. Halfway through the book, Orange pauses to include an Interlude. Like the Prologue, it provides context ... Resuming their stories, Orange brings them all together, including Tony Loneman. With his distinct facial features and impaired abilities, Tony is shaped forever by his mother’s drinking. Fetal alcohol syndrome, prevalent in many indigenous communities, is as much a part of his identity as his Cheyenne blood. Tony has his own reasons for attending the powwow, ones that take the story in a direction that is as contemporary, tragic, and American as a breaking news alert. That might be the point. In this tremendously diverse country, is it not our shared experiences that make us American? Orange simply makes the conversation more authentic.
When Margaret Atwood, Marlon James, and Louise Erdrich rave about a book before its release, it had better live up to the hype and Tommy Orange’s debut, There There very much does ... The voices of his characters are well wrought but what is most striking is the clean integration of twenty-first century technology and urban culture into the novel ... this is part of what makes Orange a superior writer: he’s not just writing stories that need to be told, he’s creating narrative with a razor sharp attention to craft ... Unlike so many of his male contemporaries, Orange does an excellent job with his female characters: they have depth, complexity, and are central, integral actors in the larger drama of the novel ... This is a truly harrowing, powerful read and a wonderfully sculpted novel.
Reader, I must confirm: There There really is an extremely good book ... As Orange’s characters attempt to reconcile themselves to their shifting sense of their identities, tragedy lurks in the background ... Orange’s crisp, elegant sentences keep things moving unobtrusively, but his greatest strength is his ability to mimic the rhythms of speech without becoming so gimmicky as to be grating. Each character in this novel has a distinct narrative voice, but there’s a unified flow from chapter to chapter; it can sweep you along. This is a trim and powerful book, a careful exploration of identity and meaning in a world that makes it hard to define either. Go ahead and go there there.
... an intensively penetrating debut novel ... Orange is not writing for a distracted reader. The novel is engrossing and relies on complicated interconnected narratives built from small details, some subtle while others explicit ... There There positions Orange as the luminary who will reignite the Native American literary movement.
There [is]...much bitterness and some sweetness to be found in Tommy Orange’s stunner of a debut ... The novel opens with a virtuosic meditation on the old Indian Head test pattern that used to appear on TV screens when TV wasn’t a 24-hour presence (technology’s impact being a recurring theme of the book), a meditation that becomes a searing summary of the history of native peoples since the European incursion. That leads us to the urban Indian ... The complexities of his many characters’ lives merge into a single channel that races toward the powwow and an explosive, heartbreaking finale. Orange gives eloquent voice to Americans too often voiceless.
...[an] astonishingly wide-ranging book ... In this vivid and moving book, Orange articulates the challenges and complexities not only of Native Americans, but also of America itself.
The propulsion of both the overall narrative and its players are breathtaking as Orange unpacks how decisions of the past mold the present, resulting in a haunting and gripping story.
