Orange circumvents these risks with his amazing ear. The depth and range of the early portraits of each of the book’s 12 main characters is deployed, put in motion, and scrambled.ĭrawing a character rapidly is intensely risky in fiction because it tends to channel broad characterizations. As we get closer to the book’s denouement, an act of violence we know is coming from the early appearance of a gun made with a 3-D printer, the chapters get shorter, more associative. We meet each character in a longish chapter, then we see them again in shortened moments. The novel is structured like a series of tightening loops. There There is Orange’s magnificent answer. How else, this novel seems to ask its participants and readers, can we see one another?

But of course even the characters in this book, many of whom struggle mightily, privately, with what it means to be Native, know that external performance is only part of identity. An event of symbolic importance, in which people can see one another being seen for what they believe they are-Native. There There, Orange’s 2018 debut novel, is a series of linked stories set in Oakland about a group of Cheyenne and Arapaho men and women who are preparing for a powwow at the Coliseum.

And here is where Tommy Orange’s genius achieves its full complexity. Now, in the 21st century, the symbiosis between forms is at its most powerful in the gestures and methods that create areas of space, sound, and portraiture. The novel as mood piece disguised as cultural history (Rachel Kushner’s The Flamethrowers).įilm has long since tempered the intensities of modernity’s idea of consciousness. The novel reinterpreted as rolling documentary (Svetlana Alexievich’s Last Witnesses), the novel as fractured archive (Valeria Luiselli’s Faces in the Crowd), the novel as endless jump cut (Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights). Twenty years into this century, novels of great quality continue to be written, books of extraordinary variety and spoken musics, many of them informed by the techniques of filmmaking.

Perhaps in the future what we will say about film is that it rescued the novel, not that it destroyed the form.

There there tommy orange full book