If There There is at times an angry and demanding book (keeping track of the characters’ relation to one another is a challenge in itself), it is also a humane one. An ersatz attempt at recapturing a bygone era, complete with dancers and MCs, is thrown into relief by a hail of bullets tearing it to shreds. Oakland, and the ill-fated powwow it hosts, comes to represent the Indian experience. Orange has construed Gertrude Stein’s comment to mean that the city she knew as a child had vanished as Oxendene muses, “so much development had happened that the there of her childhood, the there there, was gone, there was no there there any more…it’s what happened to Native people”. And in the novel’s most touching storyline, estranged sisters Jacquie and Opal attempt to make amends for past misdeeds, even as the consequences of those wrongdoings return to surprise them.
Orvil Red Feather, who is attending the powwow, dresses up in “too-small-for-him stolen regalia” and worries that he looks ridiculous. The would-be documentarian Dene Oxendene is awarded a grant to film first-hand accounts of the Native American experience. We are introduced to the obese Edwin Black, living out his grand dreams in the seclusion of his mother’s house, but brought low by banal reality Black is both literally and metaphorically constipated. Yet many of the other strands are lighter and more optimistic, encapsulating the breadth of human experience. The book steers clear of the antique romance of the open plains for that, as Orange wryly notes: “we have… Kevin Costner saving us, John Wayne slaying us an Italian guy named Iron Eyes Cody playing our parts in movies”. Orange, himself a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, deals not just with several centuries of oppression of the Native American community (which a brief, dryly witty prologue deals with in a devastatingly matter-of-fact way), but how rites and tradition can seem comically anachronistic in a world of “glass, metal, rubber, and wires, the speed, the hurtling masses” in which “the city took us in”. The novel centres on the interconnected lives of a group of Native Americans – or Indians, as they call themselves, determined to reclaim a term more often used disparagingly. Oakland happens also to be Orange’s home town and provides the setting for the book, which has attracted many admiring reviews in the US. T he title of Tommy Orange’s bold debut novel is a reference to Gertrude Stein’s line about the city of her childhood, Oakland, California: “there is no there there”, she wrote.
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