(The Radiohead song “There There” also gets a mention early in the book.) In fact, the title comes from what Gertrude Stein wrote about the city - not to belittle it, but because urbanization meant it was no longer the pastoral Oakland of her memory - that “there is no there there.” Some of the novel’s characters openly or unconsciously long for the rougher, grittier past of the rapidly gentrifying city.
The book also describes parts of Oakland so vividly that by the end, the city feels familiar even to someone who has never been. There There portrays an array of city-dwelling Native people, including a teenager who secretly teaches himself to powwow dance by watching YouTube videos, a reclusive internet addict, a recovering alcoholic coming to grips with the effects of leaving her family, an MF Doom fan marked by fetal alcohol syndrome, and a crew of young men armed with 3D-printed guns who hatch a cruel heist, among others. Like most of his book’s characters, he is an “urban Indian,” born and raised in Oakland - something of a departure from many of the most familiar and influential Native writers, whose works are often set on reservations. Orange is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma, the son of a white mother and Native father. Not bad for his first published work of fiction. (Update: Add the 2019 PEN/Hemingway Award to that list.)
So far, There There (Knopf, 2018) has been nominated for the National Book Award and the American Library Association’s Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, earned nearly unanimous critical acclaim, sparked conversations about representation of Native Americans in literature and entertainment, and been optioned for a screen adaptation. As ambitious as the book was - with its 12 narrators each telling part of the story from his or her own point of view, the plot and connections between characters gradually clicking into place until the breathtaking action of the climax at a powwow in the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum - his expectations for its reception were modest. Maybe other Native people from Oakland, California, where he grew up and where the book is set, would like it too. Tommy Orange hoped his peers in his Institute of American Indian Arts creative writing program and the Native American writing community would appreciate There There, his debut novel. C&I talks with the author of one of the most acclaimed and talked-about works of literature - Native or otherwise - in recent years, There There.
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