On the night before the powwow, Tony Loneman pulls his old regalia out of storage and puts it on, though it no longer fits. The only place in his grandmother’s house where he can see his whole body is the dark screen of the switched-off television, so he stands in front of it, lifts a foot, dips his shoulders and watches the feathers move in the glass. For twenty-one years that screen has shown him a face he hates, the face fetal alcohol syndrome gave him, which he calls the Drome. Tonight he sees a dancer instead. There There by Tommy Orange is full of moments like this one, people looking into reflective surfaces and trying to recognise themselves, and the novel’s quiet argument is that being seen accurately is a kind of survival.
There There Belongs to Oakland
Tony is the first of twelve narrators, and the book moves between them like a bus between stops. Dene Oxendene, half white and often mistaken for everything but Native, is pitching a city grant panel to fund a booth where urban Native people can record their own stories. Outside the room he meets a bearded newcomer who calls West Oakland dirt cheap and recites Gertrude Stein’s famous line about there being no there there. Dene knows the original context: Stein was mourning a childhood home that development had erased. For Native people, he thinks, that is the whole continent. The scene is where the novel finds its title, and it is the clearest statement of what the book is doing.
Orange writes the city with a resident’s precision. BART platforms, the Fruitvale, the Coliseum where a maintenance worker named Bill swats at a drone with his trash grabber, convinced it does not belong in his stadium. Bill is a Vietnam veteran who has outlived most of what he loved, and his few pages are among the most tender in There There by Tommy Orange, because the novel lets an older, gruffer man be as lost as the young ones.
The book also has a gift for grief that does not announce itself. Daniel Gonzales writes emails to his dead brother, telling him about the basement, the 3D printer and their mother’s silence. Jacquie Red Feather, eleven days sober at a conference in Phoenix, drags the minibar fridge out of her hotel room and into the corridor rather than sleep beside it. Small acts, rendered without comment, carry most of the weight.
The range of voice is the technical marvel. Some chapters sit in a close, present-tense third person; some speak straight to the reader; one addresses its own narrator as “you”; a few are confessions in the first person. Each shift is chosen for the person rather than for display, so a shy, overthinking teenager and a hard man counting debts never sound alike. In lesser hands this would be a writing exercise. In There There by Tommy Orange it becomes a portrait of a community that has always been told it speaks with one voice, and plainly does not.
Alcatraz and the Holiday That Was Not Celebrated
The chapter that stays longest belongs to Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield, remembering herself at eleven. In January 1970 her mother packs up the girls and takes them to Alcatraz, which Native activists from many nations had occupied since the previous November. The family has been out there once already, to celebrate not celebrating Thanksgiving, and Opal recounts that detail almost in passing, as a child would. Readers who know the history of the occupation of Alcatraz will recognise the holiday counter-celebration; readers who do not will want to look it up.
What follows is a coming-of-age story in miniature: stew around a bonfire, sleeping in old cells on Indian blankets, a teddy bear named Two Shoes who lectures Opal on Teddy Roosevelt, a boy throwing rocks into the bay, an older sister drinking with teenagers, and a mother with news she has been holding back. Orange writes the occupation as neither triumph nor failure but as a place where a family briefly had somewhere to be together. It is the emotional foundation of There There by Tommy Orange, and nearly every later chapter is lit by it.
That November date resurfaces elsewhere, more bitterly. Orvil Red Feather, the great-nephew Opal is raising, first sees a powwow dancer on television at twelve, and notes that it was November, the one month when Native people are easy to find on TV. At the powwow itself, after Grand Entry, he watches the dancers scatter toward the vendors and thinks of them, affectionately, as “Indians dressed up as Indians.” The line is funny and sad at once, which is the novel’s natural register. For anyone choosing a book to read across the long weekend, There There by Tommy Orange offers no turkey and no family argument over pie, only a sharper sense of what the fourth Thursday of November means to the people the pageant was supposedly about.
The Ending Leaves the Door Swinging
The final part runs in short bursts, one narrator after another, as a planned robbery at the Coliseum unravels. It is breathless and it is brutal, and then it simply stops, with several characters’ fates left undecided. The choice is defensible. Orange is not interested in tidy verdicts on lives that history has never allowed to be tidy. But a reader who has spent three hundred pages caring about these people may feel the withholding as a loss rather than an idea, and the last image, beautiful as it is, cannot fully replace the answers.
The book’s other weakness sits in the middle. Two chapters, Octavio’s in particular, are carried by long speeches of family history, a grandmother’s and an uncle’s, which deliver backstory efficiently but halt the novel’s motion. Later, the woman who drives Blue to safety gives a speech that reads as information rather than character. These are the moments where There There by Tommy Orange tells when everywhere else it shows. Readers should also know the novel is frank about addiction, suicide, sexual violence and the violence of history, and that its climax is graphic.
How Tommy Orange Found His Stories
Tommy Orange was raised in Oakland by a Cheyenne father who led ceremonies and a white mother who converted to evangelical Christianity, a split household that echoes through several of these characters. He came to writing late, after working at Gray Wolf Books, a small shop in San Leandro where he became a serious reader. The booth Dene dreams of was close to his own job, recording community stories in Oakland.
The debut was a Pulitzer finalist and gathered a shelf of first-novel prizes, and in 2025 he received a MacArthur Fellowship. He returned to the same families, and to the massacre at their root, in Wandering Stars, which works best read after this book.
Final Thoughts
Readers drawn to the novel’s way of letting family memory run under a modern plot should try The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich, a writer Tony’s grandmother loves enough to make him read aloud at bedtime. James Welch’s Fools Crow, set among the Blackfeet in the 1870s, offers the historical counterweight that the prologue only sketches.
There There by Tommy Orange is a novel about invisibility written with such force that invisibility stops being possible. Its ending will divide readers. Its voices will not. For a Thanksgiving week that wants something more honest than the pageant, start here.