June 2019 Book, There There

There There is distinguished not only by Orange's crackling style, but by its unusual subject. This is a novel about urban Indians, about native peoples who know, as he says, "the sound of the freeway better than [they] do rivers ... the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than [they] do the smell of cedar or sage..."

Orange's story takes place in Oakland, Calif., and his title comes from the famous pronouncement about rootlessness that Gertrude Stein made when, as an adult, she revisited Oakland, her childhood home. "There is no there there," Stein said.

Orange knows the feeling and the terrain: He also grew up in Oakland and is enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. But in There There, Orange wanted to do something more than fictionalize his own experience. Instead, his novel is composed of the stories of a bunch of Native and mixed-race characters, all of them eventually converging in a climactic scene at a big powwow in the Oakland Coliseum.

We readers know from the outset that something terrible will happen at that powwow the minute we meet our first character, 21-year-old Tony Loneman. Tony talks about struggles with the "Drome," meaning fetal alcohol syndrome, and is in with a bunch of lowlifes who've gotten a hold of 3-D printed plastic guns they're planning to use in a robbery at the powwow.

Other, more benign characters are drawn to the powwow for the same reasons that Americans of every race and ethnicity now log onto sites like Ancestry.com: They're searching for identity. That urge is especially strong in characters whose connection to their native heritage is more vexed, like a young woman named Blue, who was adopted at birth by a white couple. She's what Orange calls in his prologue "an apple," meaning "red on the outside and white on the inside."

 In a satiric aside, Orange says that one thing that unites the diverse powwow participants is the type of bumper stickers they've slapped on their cars: They all sport Indian pride messages like "My Other Vehicle Is a War Pony" and "Fighting Terrorism Since 1492."

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