We readers know from the outset that something terrible will happen at that powwow the minute we meet our first character, 21-year-old Tony Loneman. Instead, his novel is composed of the stories of a bunch of Native and mixed-race characters, all of them eventually converging in a climactic scene at a big powwow in the Oakland Coliseum. But in There There, Orange wanted to do something more than fictionalize his own experience. Orange knows the feeling and the terrain: He also grew up in Oakland and is enrolled in the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma. Orange's story takes place in Oakland, Calif., and his title comes from the famous pronouncement about rootlessness that Gertrude Stein made when, as an adult, she revisited Oakland, her childhood home. the smell of gas and freshly wet concrete and burned rubber better than do the smell of cedar or sage." This is a novel about urban Indians, about native peoples who know, as he says, "the sound of the freeway better than do rivers. There There is distinguished not only by Orange's crackling style, but by its unusual subject.
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