Book Report: There There

14. Tommy Orange, There There (2018) (7/1/18)

There There is a book crackling and popping with urgent energy, about urban Indians—specifically, some dozen individuals whose lives are hurtling toward a culminating powwow in the Oakland Coliseum. These people have been variously injured by addiction, desertion, or death—and always enshrouding racism—and we hear their stories in both the past and the present, first person and third (and in one case, second), as they struggle to find their identity and their way in life. Some of these people are related—though we (and they) only learn that as the story unfolds. Their webs are tangled, and there is plenty of rage and confusion in their lives, but there is also considerable love and hope.

Orange really shines in his rendition of conversations and relationship, and in internalities, and the Prologue and an Interlude contain little gems of lyric essay about Indian history and, you might say, the Indian condition. The language, in many spots, is simply gorgeous—though occasionally I found myself wondering if certain sections hadn't been written as MFA exercises. (Which is not to say they didn't still work. There was just so much variety, as if everything was being tried out—including that single second-person chapter, for which I saw no real reason.) Some characters—especially a pair of somewhat estranged sisters—were especially strong; others I had to keep flipping back to earlier sections to recall just who they were.

The final part, "Powwow," brings all the characters together, in very short chapters all in the third person that build to a culminating boom. It's magisterial to see how Orange orchestrates the events and the pacing and the perspectives.

Here's an example of the use of interiority:

Jacquie isn't listening anymore. She always finds it funny, or not funny but annoying actually, how much people in recovery like to tell old drinking stories. Jacquie didn't have a single drinking story she'd want to share with anyone. Drinking had never been fun. It was a kind of solemn duty. It took the edge off, and it allowed her to say and do whatever she wanted without feeling bad about it. Something she always notices is how much confidence and lack of self-doubt people have. Take Harvey here. Telling this terrible story [about getting lost in the desert while drunk] like it's captivating. There are so many people she comes across who seem born with confidence and self-esteem. Jacquie can't remember a day going by when at some point she hadn't wished she could burn her life down. Today actually, she hadn't had that thought today. That was something. That was not nothing.

Here's a lovely bit of description:

Opal is large. If you want to say bone-structure-wise that's fine, but she's big in a bigger sense than big-bodied or bone-structure-wise. She would have to be called overweight in front of medical professionals. But she got big to avoid shrinking. She'd chosen expansion over contractoin. Opal is a stone. She's big and strong but old now and full of aches.

Though that said, I often had little sense of what these people really looked like, how they dressed, how they comported themselves. It may have been mentioned, but such basics seemed to get lost in the lushness of the prose. Same goes for place: I couldn't really see people's kitchens or yards, I didn't have a clear sense of the look and aspect of the neighborhood. When a "brown-and-black tiger-striped pit bull baring its teeth and growling a growl so low she can feel it in her chest" is described, the passage skips straight into metaphor: "The dog is collarless and time seems the same way here, time off its leash, ready to skip so fast she'll be dead and gone before she knows it. A dog like this one has always been a possibility, just like death can show up anywhere, just like Oakland can bare its teeth suddenly and scare the shit out of you." It's beautiful, but I might have appreciated seeing whether the dog stood growling in a dirt patch full of thigh-high weeds or a garden with carefully tended roses.

Finally, here's a passage from the Interlude—an example of Orange's more essaylike prose that is oh so very pertinent today:

When we go to tell our stories, people think we want it to have gone different. People want to say things like "sore losers" and "move on already," "quit playing the blame game." But is it a game? Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks they're winning when they say "Get over it." This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that's how you know you're on board the ship that serves hors d'oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who've never even heard of the words hors d'oeuvres or fluff. Then someone from up on the yacht says, "It's too bad those people down there are lazy, and not as smart and able as we are up here, we who have built these strong, large, stylish boats ourselves, we who float the seven seas like kings." And then someone else on board says something like, "But your father gave you this yacht, and these are his servants who brought the hors d'oeuvres." At which point that person gets tossed overboard by a group of hired thugs . . . [and the shaggy story of mythmaking continues until] the boat sails on unfettered.
 If you were fortunate enough to be born into a family whose ancestors directly benefited from genocide and/or slavery, maybe you think the more you don't know, the more innocent you can stay, which is a good incentive to not find out, to not look too deep, to walk carefully around the sleeping tiger. Look no further than your last name. Follow it back and you might find your line paved with gold, or beset with traps.