Book completed

There There, by Tommy Orange. I finally got myself to read this generally excellent novel. After the first few chapters, I realized I’d better read it all in one day, and today was the day. It’s the story of “Urban Indians” – Native Americans who live in Oakland, California, where I lived for 11 years in the 1980s and a bit beyond. In fact, I lived six of those years in the same neighborhood with the author, who’s about the same age as my older son, so they would both have been about 3-9 at the time. As the story begins, we learn that several Natives are planning to steal the cash prizes from a big powwow, to be held at the Oakland Coliseum. We meet quite a few characters, whose lives all intersect on that dreadful day. We’re left in suspense about two of the characters, although there’s a prequel/sequel out just now, and a review told me about the fate of one of them.

I’m curious about two of the author’s artistic decisions – which may have been good decisions, but I wonder whether they were deliberate. One was that by having so many different characters, it’s a bit harder for the reader to relate to them as individuals than if we’d focused on just a few. Maybe the point was for us to relate to them as a collective? The second is his focus on a Native/white binary – almost all of the characters were one or the other, even random unnamed strangers. Maybe this was deliberate, if he wanted us to focus on that binary, and since he may have anticipated that a large number of his readers would be white. As someone who’s lived in Oakland, though, it seemed a bit odd for so many of the random strangers to be white, since Oakland has more Black than white residents. I only remember one person being Black – but maybe I was failing to pay enough attention.

The day I started reading the book, it was very fun for me that J. had just returned from Berkeley, and he’d been in many of the BART stations that played such a prominent role in the story.