There There

There There is Tommy Orange's 2018 debut novel, the PEN/Hemingway Award and American Book Award winner and the canonical contemporary urban Indigenous American literary novel. The structural premise is twelve Native American characters whose lives separately converge on the Big Oakland Powwow at the Oakland Coliseum. Tony Loneman, Octavio Gomez, Calvin Johnson, Daniel Gonzalez, the Red Feather brothers, Edwin Black, Dene Oxendene, Orvil Red Feather, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, Jacquie Red Feather, Blue, and Bill Davis. The chapters rotate one by one through the twelve protagonists across the days leading up to the powwow, with the final hundred pages running in real time across the morning of the powwow itself.

Orange's structural method is the patient twelve-voice ensemble construction with a non-fiction-essay prologue that runs the historical-anthropological argument the novel is going to do in fictional form. The Dene Oxendene chapters (a young Cheyenne-Arapaho documentarian collecting urban Indigenous stories with a grant from a public-arts foundation) operate as the structural mirror of Orange's own project. The Orvil Red Feather subplot (a fourteen-year-old who teaches himself powwow dancing from YouTube videos and is preparing to compete at the Big Oakland Powwow for the first time) carries the novel's structural emotional weight. The novel's structural argument (that the urban Indigenous American experience requires a literary form distinct from the reservation-based Indigenous American literary tradition) is made through the specific Oakland-and-Bay-Area texture of the ensemble cast rather than through any direct argument.

Recommended as required contemporary American literary fiction reading, as the right Orange entry point, and as the canonical contemporary urban Indigenous American novel. Read Wandering Stars (2024, the historical-and-contemporary follow-up) next. Compare to The Only Good Indians (Stephen Graham Jones) and Louise Erdrich's recent work on the broader contemporary Indigenous American literary shelf. The Darrell Dennis / Alma Cuervo / Shaun Taylor-Corbett / Kyla Garcia audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.