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There There

Tommy Orange

Start date: October 25, 2022

Finish date: November 21, 2022

Why we're reading this: There There is East Side Book Discussion's November selection! This book club will be held in person at E…more
[close] There There is East Side Book Discussion's November selection! This book club will be held in person at East Side Library on Monday, 11/21 at 2:00 PM. Visit our website or call 515-248-4152 for more details.

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Feb 03, 2021 James rated it did not like it

Shelves: us-history, short-stories, native-americans, california

So one of Orange's characters mentions reading Louise Erdrich and the author thanks Sherman Alexie in the afterword so it's clear he knows who the titans of dramatic and satiric Native American literature are and this book reads like a combination of those two authors, Louise's circular storytelling and lyricism and Alexie's humor and rawness, but this is...not good.

I don't know how someone keeps track of the characters. The perspective switches in every chapter, and you realize after a little w So one of Orange's characters mentions reading Louise Erdrich and the author thanks Sherman Alexie in the afterword so it's clear he knows who the titans of dramatic and satiric Native American literature are and this book reads like a combination of those two authors, Louise's circular storytelling and lyricism and Alexie's humor and rawness, but this is...not good.

I don't know how someone keeps track of the characters. The perspective switches in every chapter, and you realize after a little while that a lot of the characters know each other, but they are just not given room to breathe. It's story after story, with little development of character in each one, just people who do bad things to other people, or do bad things to themselves.

Maybe the idea here is that the characters struggle to know themselves as urban Indians, at the intersection of America's genocide of their people and hatred of poor people generally, as well as the urban cultures of Latin and Black people in Oakland and the greater Southwest. Urban Indians are a little like poor urban people anywhere, and a little like Black and Brown people, and mostly just inheritors of a lot of trauma.

But if this flatness and interchangeability of character is deliberate, I wonder if it's actually more dangerous than the reservation Indian stereotype that Orange wants to challenge. If an urban Native American is just an urban Oppressed person, doesn't that serve the culture that wants to erase Native American experiences?

I struggle with how acclaimed this book is. I read the reviews and I can't see what they see. I found the prologue somewhat insufferable. I don't think it's interesting to explain you book's thesis, that you wrote because you felt like the story of urban Native Americans had not been told. When Virginia Woolf claimed a room of one's own, she claimed it using the tools of modernism. When Morrison investigated the ghost of slavery, she claimed it using psychoanalysis. Erdrich uses the structure of myth and the old-fashioned detective novel as the basis of her stories. Reviewers seemed to think that Orange is cracking open the novel form with his use of many, many intersecting characters, but I think...he's just doing a bad Junot Diaz. ...more

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Jan 28, 2020 Lisa rated it liked it

Shelves: urbandale

For me, this book had too many people covering too many years with too many connections to keep track of everyone. The list of characters at the beginning helped a little, but not enough for me. Because most of the people ended up with connections to each other, it took a long time for the story to develop.

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Jul 01, 2019 Christine Comito rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Engaging novel following multiple Native American Indians backstories as they head to a big Powwow in Oakland CA. Great to show all the different personalities and not lumping Indians together into one overriding characteristic.
The ending got super confusing and was less than satisfactory.

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