There There
by Tommy Orange
Alfred A. Knopf, 2018
Review by Trenton McKay Judson
In the Pen/Hemingway winner and Pulitzer finalist novel, There There, Tommy Orange tells a multifaceted story of life in contemporary Oakland, as lived by various native people. While the novel has been readily compared to Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, it seemed more like a Faulknerian tale where all stories converge into one single event. The importance in making that distinction is that The Canterbury Tales characters tell their stories to each other and sometimes about one another. This creates a dependence on the story being told in real time. In Faulkner’s novels, most notably, The Sound and The Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom, Absalom!, character’s stories are told individually, but they are also connected by culture and events. What sets There There apart from both of these storytelling traditions is that the characters are separate but also share a sense of community, even if that community stretches across different states, genders, and economic strata.
The novel has a didactic tone, set early on in the Prologue, as Orange relates the history of the persecution of native people in the United States, including the deconstruction of the Thanksgiving feast as a tradition of peace. He also shows how a history of misrepresentation in the United States not only concerns the falsification and abuse of relationships with native peoples, but also the flat symbols that culture perpetuates to represent the people themselves. This section should be a must read for every person studying the history of the United States of America, especially concerning any relationship it has had with native peoples.
The novel begins with Tony Loneman’s story, who studies the physical effects of fetal alcohol syndrome on his face which he calls “the drome.” He comes to own this “mask” as a symbol of his loneliness and exile, a symbol which may refer to the mask that many native people have felt imposed upon them by the white majority and/or the mistakes of their predecessors.
Dene’s chapter shows his struggle with his liminal position between the white community and the native community, one that many of the characters wrestle with. Dene’s chapter also establishes the different lenses within which to tell a story, including the choice of medium and/or mode. For Dean, the medium could be a tag on a subway wall or a short film shot as a continuation of his Uncle Lucas’s legacy of assembling stories of the natives in Oakland.
Opal’s chapter recounts some of her time as a twelve-year old on Alcatraz where Jacquie reveals she is pregnant with Harvey’s baby. It is later discovered that the baby is Blue, another character integral to the novel. This is an apropos segue to Edwin’s chapter, when he contacts Harvey and tells him he is his son. Later in the book, in a Dickensonian moment of happenstance, Blue and Edwin become coworkers at the powwow. In this same contiguous vein, Jacquie and Harvey meet at a substance abuse conference. Both Opal and Jacquie seem fatefully tied to that day on Alcatraz, trapped in a prison of their mind. Opal’s prison is believing that she “shouldn’t not ever” tell her story, and Jacquie’s is that she hides from her story with alcohol and an icy exterior.
Octavio, Charles, Carlos, and Calvin show different sides of a struggle for power in a society that forces them to the fringes. What makes Orange’s stories of these young men powerful is that he doesn’t merely taint their deeds in the good/evil binary. Each character has a reason for what they are doing, even if those reasons are beclouded by vices like revenge, greed, or complacency.
The interlude, a jarring and seemingly unnecessary break in the narrative, includes an explanation on powwows and then digresses into a lecture on mass shootings. Even considering the final scene, this section of the novel does not fit within the theme. The book’s own premise is that the world is “made of stories, nothing else, just stories, and stories about stories.” With this in mind, it is difficult to justify a forced commentary in the middle of such a great story. It would have fit the narrative better if these ideas had been part of the character’s stories, woven into their dialogues and histories, the way so many other ideas are.
The catastrophic event that closes the novel was disappointing—both for its structure and its speed. The most striking inconsistency in this scene was the number of bullets and the trajectory in which they traveled. It was hard not to feel that the characters deserved a better ending, one in which the detail that was given throughout the rest of the book was given to their end. Although this makes the ending problematic in terms of believability, it is possible that Orange was making a point: it may not seem believable that so many Native Americans were slaughtered and have been systemically marginalized, but both are true and are, in many ways, still happening today.
There There is a complex narrative, one where multiple reads enhance understanding and analysis. At the core of its structure and theme, it relays an invaluable message about the potential that storytelling holds in our histories, collective consciousness, and identities.