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3.5 stars

Beautifully and powerfully written, but didn't quite feel like it's quite there yet structurally as a novel.

The threaded narrative form seems to be gaining popularity as a structural form in place of the traditional saga, allowing writers to span place, time and cultures effortlessly in a short volume by threading disparate characters. In There, There, the Big Oakland Powwow is the final knots that tie the generations of characters who are intricately weaved through fate and bloodlines. But this knot feels a little more like a finishing bow than the metaphorical intricate beadworks or red strings that stand in for the inescapable fate, more a neat flourish than a convincing denouement.

Each individual story and character, however, stand firmly etched as standalone short stories or character studies (and of course not to forget the interlude of essays). Orange writes beautifully and hauntingly, in a voice that's befitting of the heavy subject he approaches. He has a way of writing about the voids, of obliqueness -- not of the bullet that tears through flesh, but the hole it leaves; the pain that's not there because it is all too real. And that ending sequence of imageries, of longing, of belonging -- to be, longing -- is sublime.