This was a fascinating and eye opening read that I learnt a great deal from. It is beautifully written and has so many different layers all of which come together to create an important and immersive novel.

Tommy Orange's There There has been a sensation. It has had a huge response online and critically.

The multi-generational saga, split into short story style chapters which all converge on one event is certainly innovative. The tale is told from numerous different perspectives, capturing a wide variety of Native American experiences, from men, women, the old and the young and the generations in between. Orange creates a striking narrative which relentlessly drives towards the climax of its conclusion. The stories piece together, like a jigsaw puzzle, the wider narrative, and we see other characters trajectories through the stories of those around them too.

The book explores a number of issues connected to the experience of Native Americans and their identities, from connection to the land and or city, to knowing and understanding your heritage. Other themes such as substance abuse, broken families, foster care and adoption all crop up, though Orange dispels any myth that these are inherently connected to Native Americans and instead highlights how they are systemic problems of the institutional oppression, abuse and discrimination native people have faced.

Some of the stories are incredibly moving and it is enjoyable to piece together the interlinking at work in the novel. However, there are a lot of characters to keep track of and the narrative switches abruptly just as you get absorbed into a tale. This type of narrative has been achieved more successfully in other works, such as that of Louise Erdrich for example, which did diminish the novel slightly, as it did not quite live up to these expectations. The end also came somewhat abruptly and without closure. However, it was still a highly enjoyable read and it is easy to see why it has been so celebrated.

If you want to read more about contemporary Native American experiences this book is certainly a good way to start and allows you to do so in an accessible way, with an exciting and driven narrative.

I just didn't like this. There were too many characters, some of which seemed similar in background, voice etc, to keep track of and their stories were so disjointed that I couldn't really place them when they were reintroduced. I didn't warm at all to the writing style. I have to admit to not fully understanding what the author was trying to do, what was the point of it all (apart from hopelessness, misery and death with seemingly no respite, resolution, redemption or redeeming features.) I grasped the issues the author was highlighting but then he seemed to do nothing and go nowhere with them - which to me seemed to re-inforce the negativity in a self-defeating manner. The deaths were just brutal and served no purpose - I didn't feel anyone had learnt or developed. Perhaps that was very much the point but it didn't work for me. I found the gun violence gratuitous and distasteful. Unfortunately this was not the book for me.

An award-winning novel featuring multiple Native POVs. A group of disenfranchised Native men plan to rob a powwow organised by their community. Travellers to the powwow include a teenage dancer raised by his grandmother and an organiser hoping to meet his biological family. I would recommend this book to anyone interested in learning more about modern Native American life, particularly the inequalities that Native people face and the tribal councillors who connect young people to their roots.

A fantastically intricately woven story, told from the point of view of multiple characters, whose main commonality is their Native American heritage. Their seemingly disparate lives, are slowly intertwined as the narrative winds its way through their stories, culminating in a gathering of the tribes at the Big Oakland Powwow.
Orange creates vivid characters who rise up from the pages of this remarkably assured debut novel. At first you feel like there's no way he can link all these characters together, but manages to somehow steadily do so, bit by bit. I did find some of the coincidences and chance meetings a little too convenient, especially as several of them all came at once, which took away some of the power of the ending, however, it still managed to pack a highly emotional punch into its shocking denouement.
An excellent read, and well worthy of all the plaudits that it's been getting. Highly recommended.

It took me quite a while to get into There There - it's gloriously polyvocal, and it meanders for a while before beginning to build. Once I was properly immersed I loved it - funny, tender, and devastatingly sad in places, and Orange deftly juggles a huge cast with remarkably distinct voices. Highly recommended.

This was a Netgalley book. I took so long to read it I also got it out of the library in hardback!

Strong echoes of Sherman Alexie, but with a focus on the "urban Indian", set in Oakland exploring the linked experiences of generations within families, friends and co-workers. A pow-wow is being organised in Oakland as a first for this disadvantaged area. Some bring layers of bad memories, from stories of battles with the bottle, to surreal attempts to reclaim Alcatraz. Younger attendees are attracted by the prize money, or are looking to find family for the first time. A powerfully written book, I'll look out for this author's next one.

" BEFORE YOU WERE born, you were a head and a tail in a milky pool— a swimmer. You were a race, a dying off, a breaking through, an arrival. Before you were born, you were an egg in your mom who was an egg in her mom. Before you were born, you were the nested Russian grandmother doll of possibility in your mom’s ovaries. You were two halves of a thousand different kinds of possibilities, a million heads or tails, flip-shine on a spun coin. Before you were born, you were the idea to make it to California for gold or bust. You were white, you were brown , you were red, you were dust. You were hiding, you were seeking. Before you were born, you were chased, beaten, broken, trapped on a reservation in Oklahoma. Before you were born, you were an idea your mom got into her head in the seventies, to hitchhike across the country and become a dancer in New York."

This was a brilliant read. Each chapter is a different persons story that all join at the end. Every POV had a different feel and a different tone. It is incredible how one author can write so many different yet authentic voices.
This book definitely deserves the hype.

A multi-POV novel whose climactic incident is the Oakland Powwow, where a tragedy occurs (no spoilers; you can guess as much from the jacket copy). As the book proceeds, it becomes clear that every one of the characters we care about will be involved with the Powwow - and are connected to each other - in some way. Orange interleaves sections narrated by none of the characters, or perhaps by all of them, which deal overtly with the painful legacy of Native displacement in America. His writing is so assured, so poetic and so graceful, that these sections don't feel clunky or shoehorned in, but rather constitute an integral part of the book, articulating clearly what each character's story can only suggest. Powerful and beautiful, even if there are sometimes too many characters to keep track of.

Outstanding novel exploring the Native American community by way of a multigenerational story with interludes of history throughout. Very powerful!

This book was so fantastic. Told from many different points of view, this interwoven story is one of rage, hope, sadness, despair and redemption. Twelve different characters lives become unknowingly entangled as they each travel to the Big Oakland Powwow. I don’t actually want to give too much of the plot away because watching it unfold is breathtaking, this books was such a page turner. The prose was beautiful and haunting and each character is so expertly realised and developed. The book taught me a lot about Native history that I wasn’t aware of and the hardships and challenges the community continue to face. After reading Heart Berries I was keen to read more Native literature and this was a stunning debut by Tommy Orange. Sign me up to read anything else he puts out because I guarantee he’s going to be a household name.
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Thanks to @netgalley and @vintagebooks for the ARC for review. ☺️

A huge body-blow of a novel. There There is a story told in fragments, skipping and circling around the many characters, dipping in and out of their heads and presenting them inside and out. It’s a furious account of loss, erasure, identity, authenticity and places Native people squarely in the modern world with all of its conflicting demands on people who are often dismissed as an anachronism but also expected, and in some ways forced, to remain static and unchanging.

It follows a group of Native characters, sometimes in the first person and sometimes in the third, as they live in the modern world with all the weight of the past impressed upon them. Providing an antidote to the two-dimensional presentation and stereotypes of Native people Orange creates a cast full of complexity and contrasts from Tony Loneman afflicted with foetal alcohol syndrome and a propensity for violence to Orvil Red Feather a teenager who, after months of YouTube tutorials, is preparing to dance at his first powwow. These characters are fiercely, powerfully individual and embody all the pressures of their modern lives and their cultural inheritance, each attempting to resolve them in different ways.

The narrative is reflective of one character’s (Dene Oxendene) project to capture the stories of Native people without directorial intervention. Orange’s stories are fictional but they are full of life and the many threads of the narrative draw inexorably to the shattering conclusion, foretold from the start but still hugely powerful precisely because the hope that it will end differently grows with every page. The slow coalescence of the story as it feels out the characters and reveals the complex web of connections between them is masterful adding to the reader’s investment in the story and to the ever ratcheting tension. Despite the inevitable tragedies there’s a note of hope and optimism that rings true right the way through it and remains long after it is over. Both brash and subtle There There is a thoroughly modern, urban and humane story about what it means, and how it feels, to be an Urban Indian.

One word review: Relentless

Rambling review: A haunting portrayal of Native American life in the 21st century, a community of "left behinds", whom society has failed. It is a compelling read which opens the window onto every day lives, and what it means to be "native".

Each character is a voice for the different struggles faced by the Native American community. It isn't multigenerational in the same way, say, Pachinko is, but rather in an intersectional way.

As a British person very unfamiliar with Native American history beyond the basics (i.e.  the genocide), I found the non fiction interludes, where Orange explained the significance of Pow Wows and surnames, especially interesting and helpful in understanding the importance of certain plot points.

P.S. Can you recommend any other Native American fiction to me? Please and thank you?

** blog scheduled to go live on 14th august **

I heard this was a multigenerational story with Native American characters which made me think the book would be similar to Pachinko which I really loved. I’m not quite sure I would describe it as a multigenerational story, yes it does have characters from about 3 generations, but really the book is just using each character as a way to show a different challenge faced by Native American people. I found the different perspectives to be really confusing at first, due to how many there were, and to be honest even by the end there were a few characters that I couldn’t quite place, but I enjoyed the book. It’s definitely a more character driven novel than anything else, the little plot there is is just an excuse to have all of the different sides of the story come together at the end. I wish the book had been longer, but I think the topics covered – abuse, drug addiction, suicide, living in a community where these things are the norm, or living outside it but not by choice, are very important and communicated really well.

This is not going to be a popular view, but I didn’t think There There was a very successful novel. The history it conveys and the points it makes about the treatment of Native Americans are extremely important and it is essential that Native American voices should be heard, but for me it didn’t make a compelling, readable or involving novel. I found the fragmented structure too disruptive and the multitude of stories, told in a very similar voice throughout, meant that I never quite engaged with each one before a cut to a different one.

The very fine song White Man’s World by Jason Isbell contains the couplet,
“I’m a white man living on a white man’s street
I’ve got the bones of the red man under my feet...”
and those two lines had as much impact on me as the whole of There There, I think. We really do need to hear the stories of those bones and of the living descendants of the bones’ owners, and I applaud Tommy Orange’s noble purpose in trying to tell some of them. However, this felt to me more like a rather fragmented history lesson than a novel. There are some very fine novels now about African American history and slavery (Colson Whitehead’s recent and excellent Underground Railroad, for example) and Native American history needs them too. There There isn’t bad by any means, but however great the need and however admirable its aim, for me it doesn’t come into that category.

(My thanks to Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)

It is all but easy to summarise Tommy Orange’s novel. There is Dene Oxendene, a young film maker who applies for a grant to realise a dream he and his deceased uncle had: give Native Americans a voice, make them tell their stories to ensure that they are not lost. There are Opal and her sister Jacquie, first as teenagers, later as grand-parents, struggling in a world which is not made for them. Edwin who is looking for his father and thinks he just found him on the Internet whereas his colleague Blue still doesn’t know who her biological parents are. Orvil and his two younger brothers who prepare secretly for a dance. And a group of young boys who prepare a ferocious and malicious attack on the place where most of the characters will gather: the powwow.

Tommy Orange introduces his novel with a prologue which outlines the Indian history. It starts with the first encounter with the coloniser and continues as a series of loss and suppression and ends in a group of people who have lost not only their land, but also their culture, identity and pride. The author himself is of Cheyenne and Arapaho decent, so he knows what he is writing about and he thus gives the Natives an authentic voice. Yes, it is an inconvenient truth he tells, but a truth worth reading and thinking about.

The title already is quite confusing, but Orange makes one of his characters give an explanation quoting Gertrude Stein who

(...) was talking about how the place where she’d grown up in Oakland had changed so much, that so much development had happened there, that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there anymore (...) The quote is important to Dene. This there there. (...) for Native people in this country, all over the Americas, it’s been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there.

The Natives have lost much more than their land. And up to today they have been treated differently. A lot of things that happen to the characters in the novel – getting pregnant at a very young age, being addicted to alcohol etc. – also happen to people from other ethnic backgrounds, however, they then are considered the odd uncle or the eccentric aunt and the like. Looking at the Native community, those things are regarded as the normal case, it is not something that anybody would wonder about. They always live at the fringe of society, even if they complete school and get a degree, they will have to perform much better than a white competitor to get a job.

The most striking aspect of the novel for me was the trouble that all the characters experience. On the one hand, they are forced to hide their culture and traditions because they do not belong to the mainstream culture, on the other hand, this leads to a certain loss which is felt but difficult to express. They sense that they are missing something, that they need explanations which nobody will give them. Their identity is never really complete which consequently ends in serious disturbances.

Tommy Orange is a remarkable writer who gives his fellow Natives an important voice that absolutely should be heard. Certainly, he doesn’t shrink from accusing what the colonisers and the white ruling classes have done to the indigenous population, however, he provides insight in what this actually meant and thus opens ways for a hopefully better future. This will not be an easy way, but one that has to be walked together.

I love novels that immerse me in a culture I don't know and give me an insight into lives that I am not living. There There is written by a Native American author (or Indian, as he would have it), narrating the stories of various members of the Native American community in and around Oakland, California. It is a poor community, largely urbanised, largely invisible to wider America. As the popular conception of Native Americans doesn't extend much further than the silent, sink-throwing character in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, members of the community are widely mistaken as hispanic or just undefined people of colour.

What we find is a subculture within (and around) a neglected city, living in the shadow of its more successful neighbour. The characters we meet include ageing hippies, a documentary film maker, gangsters, a drug peddler, alcoholics, community workers, absent parents and abandoned children. Some are proud of their heritage, others are embarrassed by it. Some embrace their tribal regalia, others think it feels like dressing up as Red Indians, and still others are not even aware of their ancestral roots.

In looking at their stories, the reader is invited to consider what it means to be Indian. Do you have to register? Do you have to know your tribal history? Do you learn to read the land or is it innate? How is the land even relevant when you live in Oakland?

There is a narrative arc where the various characters are all heading to a powwow in the Coliseum. They all have different reasons for being there - most of them not strictly pleasurable. In fact, the powwow sounds like a pretty dreadful thing: drums, dancing competitions, food stalls and lots of milling around. There's a huge commercial angle and a giant sense of obligation. There are grants and an organising committee, but never much sense of what the powwow is supposed to be. And it doesn't end well.

But the real strength of There There is this window into other people's lives. Most are compelling if somewhat compact. Perhaps there are slightly too many gangsters and their story is a little hard to follow. Overall, though, the sense of having been born into poverty and trapped in a world of low expectations brings the many short stories together into a coherent whole. Add some small doses of editorial comment, history and some great metaphors... In particular, there's a story of the white guy settling into someone's apartment and turning it into an office which is a great metaphor for colonial settlement.

There There is a short, accessible read with multiple narrators and points of view. It is socially important and gives a voice to a community that many readers will never have known they have not previously heard. It is a story that is set in the present day and is completely relevant to 2018, but also probably relevant to decades past and decades still to come.

Thoroughly recommended.

Chapters from the points of view of a number of different characters and voices. Centres on the Native American experience of alienation with a focus on the Oakland pow wow.

“Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. We came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the open hills better than any other deep wild forest. We know the sound of the freeway better than we do rivers, the howl of distant trains better than wolf howls, we know the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than we do the smell of cedar or sage or even fry bread - which isn’t traditional, like reservations aren’t traditional, but nothing is original, but everything comes from something that came before, which was once nothing. Everything is new and doomed. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”

What’s not to like? Tommy Orange’s novel draws its title from Gertrude Stein’s quote about Oakland (where the book is set), ”there is no there there”, by which she means that her hometown has completely changed from the “there” that she comes from, but one character makes reference to Radiohead’s song “There, there” (“just ‘cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there”) and it’s always a plus when a book includes Radiohead references. Then a character talks glowingly about Darren Aronofsky’s movies and Darren Aronofsky is my favourite film director. Then the book is structured as the interlinking stories of a dozen Urban Indians which is a structure that I have enjoyed in several other books (e.g. Sleeping on Jupiter from Anuradha Roy or the Vernon Subutex trilogy from Virginie Despentes. Or the movie Magnolia.). Also, Orange has acknowledged the influence of Denis Johnson (amongst others) in his writing and I am a great fan of Johnson’s writing: his influence is very obvious as you read.

Radiohead, Aronofsky, Johnson and interlinking narratives like Magnolia. That’s a lot of reasons to like a book. However, it has to be acknowledged that several of those reasons are non-literary, which is not a bad thing, but does point to the fact that the book has a cinematic feel to it. The ending is a bit over the top and it seems that a drone is introduced into the story purely so that the movie version can have aerial shots of the dramatic finale. But that is the only complaint I have about an otherwise completely absorbing novel.

If, like me, you have watched all the seasons of Treme on the TV, you will have some images in your head of Native American regalia and music. In the TV series, these are Mardi Gras Indians and I am not sure how well the costumes and music represent the real Native Americans. But this is part of the importance of this book as nearly all of us have some misconstrued images of Native Americans and it is good to read this open exploration.

There, There is an exploration of Native American culture in the modern world told through the voices of a dozen different narrators as preparations are made for a powwow in Oakland coliseum. We meet Dene who is documenting that culture to create a documentary in honour of his uncle. We meet Edwin who is searching for his father and takes a job on the organising committee as it may give him a chance to meet the man. We meet Jacquie, a recovering alcoholic travelling to the powwow (I’m being a bit vague in order to avoid spoilers). And we meet Tony Loneman who is attending the powwow with darker plans. And there are others. We learn about the back stories of the narrators as they all converge on the powwow. We learn about how their lives are connected. The dramatic ending is telegraphed from early on in the book so comes as no surprise. It is the most cinematic part of the novel with a huge debt to Quentin Tarantino (yes, there’s violence and there is blood).

There is a lot of powerful writing here. Like Johnson's writing, Orange is able to write about the darker experiences of people in a way that makes them feel real. It is a book well worth reading.

There There is a gripping novel about a collection of people brought together by the Big Oakland Powwow, telling a story of cycles of violence and family. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and back in Oakland after a long time, not sure if she's ready to see her grandsons and her sister Opal. Edwin is looking for his father and proving he can get out of the house and do things. Dene is collecting Native stories about Oakland to honour his uncle. Blue is organising the event and looking for her mother. And all the while, a plan to rob the powwow lurks beneath the preparations.

This is an explosive novel with a lot of energy. The narrative weaves the perspectives of a number of interconnected characters, telling the stories of how they ended up at the powwow and how their lives have unfolded in and around Oakland. It has a very distinctive sense of place as well as character, focusing on urban Native American life and identity. Oakland is really another character in the novel, and it is the location of the powwow that brings the characters all together, regardless of their connections.

There There is a thoroughly modern novel that looks backwards and forwards, bringing together the stories of a range of characters and how they relate to culture, identity, and violence. It is an impressive piece of literary fiction ideal for anyone looking for novels centred around place, identity, and character, or books that tell diverse stories from people with a multifaceted sense of culture and identity.