There There

I've been hearing about this book for years, and meaning to get to it, and I'm also currently trying to get more knowledgeable about Indian/native issues in the U.S., so it was time and past time. Also, the book is set in my city; it's always a plus when you can picture the landmarks and yourself in them.

This multi-character novel of urban Indian life is stark, often painful, and extremely embodied. All of the characters are ambivalent about their relationships to being Indian, in a multitude of different ways. Orange does an especially good job of picking a wide range of viewpoint characters, who differ in age, in gender, in economic status (though no one is rich), in family history, and in personality style.

Inevitably in novels with this many separate protagonists, the characters begin coming together early (two are sisters, so together from their first appearances) and the connections continue and grow, rising to a crescendo in the novel's highly dramatic climax. Orange's sense of pacing is superb, carefully orchestrated to make the reader more and more nervous as the big moments come closer. And the climax itself is unflinching.

One of those novels that you don't exactly read "for pleasure," but for insight, for excitement, and in the end, for painful empathy.

I really wanted to like this book. I found the premise interesting and was intruigued to learn more about the lives of Native Americans, but I found the book too confusing and the characters not well-rounded enough for me to distinguish some of them from one another. I had to keep flicking back to earlier in the book to see if I had met this character before, heard about them from another character, or whether they were a new person suddenly injected into the story three-quarters of the way in. It didn't help that a character referred to as David by another character actually was called Daniel when we met him properly.
The idea of meeting all these characters who are interlinked with one another in their own chapter was similar to the concept in Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other, but it worked much better for me in that book than in There, There. Evaristo's characters seemed more fully rounded and I cared far more about them than Tommy Orange's. Perhaps this was also because the majority of characters in Girl, Woman, Other are women or identify as women and so I could understand them better almost immediately and that helped me to warm to them more. I did find the three women in Tommy Orange's story much easier to identify with than any of the male characters. 
According to the blurb, we meet 12 characters in There, There, but to me it felt like at least 20-25 as I struggled to recognise them. And I felt short-changed by how much he delved into some of the characters that I did really like, such as Dene Oxendene.

There There follows twelve Native Americans in the days running up to the Oakland powwow, exploring the identity of a people whose home is just not there any more. Dene plans to film the stories of Natives at the powwow, to tell the tales that are usually forgotten.

I'm not sure if the stories told by the characters are necessarily those recorded by Dene as I had expected, because of what happens at the end. Everyone has their reasons for attending the powwow, for some it's work, for some it's to remember their culture, to socialise, for others it's all about the prize money. And some people are willing to cross the line for that money.

Pretty much everyone's lives are affected in some way by alcoholism or substance abuse. There's the teenage boy born with foetal alcohol syndrome, the alcoholic mother who no longer has her children, a drug dealer, the kids adopted or fostered because of their parents' addictions, families left broken and adrift and those who work in the Indian Centre to help the addicts. It's a depressing vision of life as an "urban Indian".

Tommy Orange set out to challenge the stereotype of the Native American, strong, silent and mystical. I'm sure substance abuse is a huge problem in Native communities but it would have been nice to have a broader cross-section of people represented if this was what he was doing. Instead, he chooses to show the damaged lives, leaving it up to the reader to link history with the reason why such addiction is so rampant.

I did like the historical parts and his writing is at its strongest when its directly talking about the place of Natives in modern America. They feel forgotten, erased. It's certainly a literary novel, one where plot is definitely not a high priority. It's a short book and there are a lot of characters to get to know. I felt it skipped onto a new person before I had a chance to get properly invested in their story. And what on earth was going on with those spider legs?!

I'm not sure if I missed something but I didn't understand how everything escalated at the end. It seemed too extreme, but then I don't live in a country with gun violence. It was traumatic but the book ended before any resolution. Are we not meant to care what happened to these people? Is this a statement about apathy towards Natives? I feel like the book ended where it was just getting going.

Most reviews I've seen have been full of praise. I just think I don't get on with this type of literature any more. I want a story, I want an ending and I want to get to know a few characters well rather than lots in passing.