Tommy Orange - There There

Rating: 3/5

Review:
Admirable intent but not a great novel

This is not going to be a popular view, but I didn’t think There There was a very successful novel. The history it conveys and the points it makes about the treatment of Native Americans are extremely important and it is essential that Native American voices should be heard, but for me it didn’t make a compelling, readable or involving novel. I found the fragmented structure too disruptive and the multitude of stories, told in a very similar voice throughout, meant that I never quite engaged with each one before a cut to a different one.

The very fine song White Man’s World by Jason Isbell contains the couplet,

“I’m a white man living on a white man’s street

I’ve got the bones of the red man under my feet...”

and those two lines had as much impact on me as the whole of There There, I think. We really do need to hear the stories of those bones and of the living descendants of the bones’ owners, and I applaud Tommy Orange’s noble purpose in trying to tell some of them. However, this felt to me more like a rather fragmented history lesson than a novel. There are some very fine novels now about African American history and slavery (Colson Whitehead’s recent and excellent Underground Railroad, for example) and Native American history needs them too. There There isn’t bad by any means, but however great the need and however admirable its aim, for me it doesn’t come into that category.

(My thanks to Vintage for an ARC via NetGalley.)