There There by Tommy Orange

Published 2018 · 304 pages · 74,771 words · about 6 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction

How hard is There There to read?

There There scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 55 out of 100
Orange writes in immediate, vernacular prose that captures urban Native American voices. The vocabulary incorporates contemporary slang, cultural references, and the specific textures of Oakland life without demanding specialized knowledge.
Sentence structure: 55 out of 100
Sentences are often punchy and direct, building through the distinct rhythms of multiple narrators. Orange's prose has the energy of voices that need to be heard, cutting between characters with cinematic momentum.
Abstraction: 65 out of 100
The novel explores identity, history, and what it means to be Native American in urban spaces through characters converging on the Big Oakland Powwow. Their separate stories become a study in how violence and resilience are inherited.
Information density: 60 out of 100
Native American history, Oakland neighborhoods, and the textures of urban Indian life layer through the narrative. Orange builds his portrait through accumulated attention to ceremonies, YouTube tutorials, and the small details that mark lives lived between worlds.
Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
Multiple perspectives reveal different relationships to Native identity and the powwow. The reader must track how the characters connect while understanding what brings them together will also tear everything apart.
Symbolic density: 60 out of 100
The powwow becomes symbolic of attempts to reclaim what was stolen. The city becomes symbolic of displacement that cannot be reversed. The violence becomes symbolic of what colonialism leaves in Native communities.
Ironic distance: 52 out of 100
Orange maintains close proximity to all his characters while the convergent structure creates dramatic irony. The novel is angry about what history did to Native people while tender about how they survive.
Resolution withholding: 58 out of 100
The powwow reaches its devastating conclusion; what survives remains to be seen. Orange offers the tragedy without pretending anything is resolved.
Structural complexity: 65 out of 100
Twelve perspectives converging on a single event create demanding structure. The form requires tracking many characters, with the powwow providing orientation as everything moves toward it.

How There There is regarded

There There holds a literary regard score of 64 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Prizes

Where There There sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (138 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, There There scores 70 out of 100. A second mythos, romance, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Low Mimetic
THE DROME FIRST CAME to me in the mirror when I was six.
Symbol: Formal
Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.
Mythos: Irony iv (Tragic Pathos) (irony iv)
The tragedy of it all will be unspeakable, the fact we’ve been fighting for decades to be recognized as a present-tense people, modern and relevant, alive, only to die in the grass wearing feathers.
Genre: Novel + Anatomy
We are Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNs and Ind’ins, Status Indians and Non-Status Indians

Where the story of There There takes place

  • Oakland and the Coliseum, the Big Oakland Powwow, late 2010s (2016 to 2018), the main setting
  • Colonial massacres from Plymouth to Sand Creek (prologue) (1621 to 1864)
  • Alcatraz occupation, Indians of All Tribes, 1970-71 (1970 to 1971)

5 things that are true of There There, with the passage for each

  1. The prologue says the head of Metacomet (King Philip) was sold to Plymouth Colony for thirty shillings.

    Metacomet’s head was sold to Plymouth Colony for thirty shillings—the going rate for an Indian head at the time.

  2. The robbers' guns are 3-D printed, which Octavio demonstrates to Tony in his backyard.

    “It’s 3-D printed. You wanna see?” he said.

  3. Opal's full name is Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, and the kids at school mocked it.

    That makes me Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield.

  4. Orvil pulls what he believes are spider legs out of a lump in his leg in a Target bathroom.

    I’m pretty sure they’re spider legs,” Orvil says.

  5. In the hospital waiting room Opal counts the swings of the double doors and they stop on eight.

    The doors come to a rest on the number eight

Scenes in There There that Frye would name

56 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Sparagmos, untitled
Metacomet was beheaded and dismembered. Quartered. The prologue's founding scene is the tearing apart of an Indian body, displayed as trophy.
Sparagmos, untitled
They did more than kill us. They tore us up. Mutilated us. Sand Creek retold as dismemberment of a whole people.
Anagnorisis, untitled
I see myself in the man’s face. Edwin recognizes his father in a JPEG, pivoting his search for identity.
Anagnorisis, untitled
the face embedded in an orb of fat, the eyes and nose and mouth, they were his. Jacquie recognizes Harvey from Alcatraz in the AA circle.
Anatomy, untitled
We are Indians and Native Americans, American Indians and Native American Indians, North American Indians, Natives, NDNs and Ind’ins An encyclopedic catalogue of Native identity categories in the interlude.
Cognitio, untitled
“I think that woman was my mom,” Blue says. Blue identifies the birth mother she met by accident beside Edwin's father.

Books that share these scenes with There There

About the author

Tommy Orange