Orange was born to a white mother and native father to Orange, the “there” (his identity) not being there comes from not being introduced to his father’s traditional life. The “there” can be interpreted in several manners.

Instead, he turned to a Gertrude Stein quote, “There is no there, there.” However, Orange did not name the novel after the song despite the lyrics relating to themes. Erik Zawodniak at University of Connecticutīack to the Radiohead song, it is coined by a character in the novel discussing the loss of native identity in urban settings. He wanted to see stories of ‘urban Indians’ like himself represented. He got the idea for There There out of frustration with the literary canon of Native Americans being restricted to reservations. Orange wishes to portray a modern native story and fight against stereotypes. I had the opportunity to read this book in a contemporary literature class, and the storytelling devices Orange uses are masterful when it comes to the overarching theme of the novel. Sharing a name with a Radiohead song “There, There,” the novel follows multiple characters identifying as native as they prepare for a pow-wow in Oakland. Orange identifies as part of the Cheyenne and Arapaho nations and currently resides in Oakland, Cali., U.S.A. Being Orange’s first published novel, he received high praise for the riveting storytelling and themes related to urban native identity. Through these characters, the reader is shown a history that may be unknown - for example the real-life occupation of Alcatraz by Indians in 1969-1971 in an effort to reclaim the land as their own.“There, There” is a novel published by Tommy Orange in 2018. I personally did not have much of a challenge with that in this case given the strong, unique personalities exhibited by each character.

Sometimes novels with so many characters can be hard to follow with the reader having to constantly remember who is who. Foundational to the plot is a large Oakland Pow-wow looming large on the calendar and at which many of the previously unconnected characters converge. The prologue of the novel, which is about nine pages in length, hits the reader from the very start with a different history of the start of the now-United States, the evolution of the native experience, and the unique modern day urban Indians, who struggle to self-identify in a world that often does not see them.įrom there, we meet the first of the twelve characters whose stories are explored over the course of the novel, which itself is divided up into four parts with sub-sections in the voice of each of the twelve characters with variable order and frequency of appearance.

Author of there there