Books |
There There
Tommy Orange
By
Published: Mar 24, 2019
Category:
Fiction
Butler reviewed this book in September, 2019. Six months later, Tommy Orange won the 2019 PEN/Hemingway Award for the most distinguished first book of fiction. The judges called “There There” a “devastatingly beautiful novel, as acutely attuned to our current cultural and political condition as it is to the indelible legacy of violence that brought us here…. The breadth and scope of this novel are matched only by the fierce and relentless intelligence that Orange brings to his characters, who despite tragedy, heartbreak and loss, reside in a remarkable world of hard-earned grace.”
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GUEST BUTLER CARLA B. KEITH describes herself as “an old fat white hillbilly woman from a flyover state who got a scholarship and went to a Land Grant university.” She does the New York Times crossword on even the most challenging days.
I’m not Tommy Orange’s mother, or auntie, or literary agent, but you’ll think I am, because I love, love, love this book. I read it in a day and a half, and it only took that long because I didn’t want it to end.
“There There” tells the story of a dozen Native Americans who attend a Native Powwow in Raider Stadium in Oakland, California, that place Gertrude Stein memorably described as having no “there there.” These aren’t Native Americans from the reservation, with sand in their boots. They’re urban. As Tommy Orange writes: “We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread.” [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
To give you an idea of the author, here’s a video he made:
Let me introduce the characters:
Tony Loneman, who opens and closes the book, calls himself “The Drome” because he was diagnosed with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome after his mother drank while she was pregnant. “People look at me and then look away when they see me see them see me…The Drome is my mom and why she drank, it’s the way history lands on a face…”
Tony gets drugs from Carlos and Octavio. “When I found Octavio, he was all kinds of fucked up. It always makes me think of my mom when I see people like that. I wondered what she was like drunk when I was in her. Did she like it? Did I?”
They have a friend who makes guns with a 3-D printer. White guns.
Dene Oxendene bluffs his way into a grant to film the oral stories of Native Americans. He’s using an old movie camera given to him by his dying uncle. “He wanted to believe that when he turned on the camera, his uncle was with him, seeing through it.”
As a child, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield was taken to the Native American sit-in at Alcatraz Island. She’s raising her three great-nephews because their mom has taken off and left them with her. She works as a mail person and wants nothing to do with Native Culture.
Three nephews — named Orvil, Loother and Lony because their mom wanted unique spellings of their names — roam the streets of Oakland on their bikes. Orvil has been learning to dance Native style by watching You Tube videos. “There on screen, in full regalia, the dancer moved like gravity meant something different for him… In that moment, he knew… He was part of something. Something you could dance to.” He puts on his Opal’s dicarded regalia and studies himself in the mirror: “He stands, weak in the knees, a fake, a copy, a boy playing dress-up….He’s waiting for something true to appear before him—about him….because the only way to be Indian in this world is to look and act like an Indian. To be or not to be Indian depends on it.”
The boys get the money to attend the Powwow by scooping out the coins people have thrown into fountains for wishes.
Jacquie Red Feather has only days of sobriety, struggling to go One Day at a Time while working as an addiction counselor. The account of an AA meeting of Native Americans rings as true as anything I can imagine about how those stories would sound.
Edwin Black, a college graduate who still lives with his mom, is addicted to the Internet. He has gained so much weight that “my college graduation picture stayed as my profile pic until recently, because a few months, even a year, was fine, not abnormal, but after four years it was the socially unacceptable kind of sad.” He finds his lost father through the Internet, and ends up taking a job as one of the planners of the Powwow partly to get out of the house and partly to introduce himself to his dad who is the emcee of the Powwow.
And others. They all converge on the Powwow.
You should converge with them.
