Yes, Tommy Orange’s New Novel Really Is That Good

THERE THERE
By Tommy Orange
288pp. Knopf $25.95.

(This book was selected as one of The New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2018. For the rest of the list, click here.)

In George R. Stewart’s “Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States,” there is a single mention of Oakland, Calif.: “Across the bay from San Francisco was a stretch of flat land scattered with magnificent California live oaks. In Mexican times it had been known as Encinal del Temescal, ‘oak-grove of the sweat-house.’ The Americans who planned a town there may not have known Spanish, but they could see the trees. In simple description they called it Oakland.”

In Tommy Orange’s “There There,” an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life, on tradition all the more pressing because of its fragility, it is as if he seeks to reconfigure Oakland as a locus of desire and dreams, to remake the city in the likeness of his large and fascinating set of characters.

The title of his book comes from Gertrude Stein — who, one of the book’s characters discovers, “found that she 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.”

In this big, noisy novel filled with absences, stray clues, odd traces, Orange has managed to fix his attention fiercely on Oakland as a place of pure stability. “I feel bad sometimes even saying I’m Native,” one of the characters says. “Mostly I just feel I’m from Oakland.” Toward the end of the book one of the characters “is the fire and the dance and the night,” but in the next sentence “he’s standing in front of a BART map.”

Orange makes Oakland into a “there” that becomes all the more concretely, emphatically and fully so in a novel that deals, in tones that are sweeping and subtle, large-gestured and nuanced, with what the notion of belonging means for Native Americans.