The book, Orange's first novel, is a beautiful, rich, grim, deeply
moving work of literature.
(On April 15th, the 2019 Pulitzer Prizes were announced. The fiction award was given to The Overstory, by Richard Powers. Two
additional books were listed as finalists; one was There There.)
Orange grew up in Oakland, California. As his biography notes, he is an "enrolled
member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma." The novel takes place for the most part in
Oakland, and its central characters are Native Americans--"Urban
Indians," as Orange writes.
One of the (many) facets of the novel I am drawn to is the following (granted, it is
perhaps not the most important aspect of the novel, yet it is, to me, striking
and compelling nonetheless): it is a periodic,
particular kind of locution--poetic, repetitive, echo-like.
The prologue to the book, for example, has this epigraph,
from Bertolt Brecht: "In the dark
times/Will there also be singing?/Yes, there will also be singing./About the
dark times."
Orange writes this, in a chapter about the character Dene
Oxendene, who is seated on a train: "Dene only realizes he's
been stuck underground between stations for ten minutes after ten minutes of
being stuck underground between stations."
From There There's
"Interlude," mid-book: "We get used to everything to the point
that we even get used to getting used to everything."
From the character Edwin Black: "The trouble with believing is you have
to believe that believing will work, you have to believe in belief."
Of the character Orvil Red Feather, Orange writes: "He
doesn't want to know what he knows but he knows."
About the character Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield: "That's what Opal had been doing.
Closing her eyes and ears to the closing of her eyes and ears."
(This past week I was reading the book A Zen Harvest: Japanese Folk Zen Sayings, compiled and translated
by Sōiku Shigematsu [North Point Press, 1988].
I came upon the following saying, in the book, which put me in mind of the
above phrasings by Orange: "Given
it up, you say?/But what have you given up?/Very well, you've given up/The idea
of giving up.")
There is also, of course (regarding echoes, repetitions), the novel's title itself. The title (as noted in the book) comes
from an often-quoted remark by Gertrude Stein, who spent much of her childhood
in Oakland: "There is no there
there," Stein said, of Oakland.
Orange writes, of his character Dene Oxendene, that Oxendene had "looked up the quote in its original
context, in [Stein's] Everybody's
Autobiography, and 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."
Dene
Oxendene finds broader meaning in Stein's phrase, regarding Native American
life, and history. Writes Orange: "The quote
is important to Dene. This there there.
He hadn't read Gertrude Stein beyond the quote. But for Native people in this country, all over
the Americas, it's been developed over, buried ancestral land, glass and
concrete and wire and steel, unreturnable covered memory. There is no there there."
Here is the link, on amazon.com, to Orange's extraordinary novel; in May, the book will be released in paperback.
