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Booker Longlist 2024

“The spiders weave a web to keep the stars in place, as guiding light in our darknesses. The stars are our ancestors, but the spiders are too. They are the weaving and the light.�� Tommy Orange gets to the soul of Indian/Native spirituality, the whole nonlinear beauty of time and life and celestial grace.

It's so rare that I just want to reproduce bushels of quotes from the book as the gist of my review. TO’s passages are so elegant and infinite, I am deeply moved by his themes of assimilation, alienation, addiction, sobriety, suicide, stories, sickness, psychosis, isolated trauma and shared trauma, generational trauma, memory, death. I felt a collective consciousness with all the characters, because Tommy Orange puts people in his stories, not stand-ins. It’s fiction, but the characters are specific and dimensional, their interiorities a deep well. He gets to the heart of storytelling.

“There are many stories for what happens after you die. You become light or become dead light of stars or you swim the river in the sky or you become the soil in the earth. Angels and demons and ghosts. Anything is a story we tell ourselves about a silence.��

Within the author’s sublime language, he makes no bones about the pain of Natives. Like There There, Orange nails it when it comes to addiction, not just from a reportage kind of view, but inside, in the essence of a person who is suffering, screaming inside and yet somehow seeming to function, until they don’t. All the pretty words that Orange uses become solid, brick-like, when he talks about addiction.

“That’s what addiction had aways felt like, like the best little thing you’d forget on the worst day possible, or the worst big thing on a day in a life you thought kept getting better because you kept getting high.��

I am thrilled I read this right after reading TT. You don’t have to, they both stand alone, but together they are even more exceptional, as this novel is both a prequel and a sequel to There There. The story opens with the harrowing Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, when the US Army slaughtered the Arapaho and Cheyenne tribes. My heart was already in my teeth at that point.

The descendant line is re-imagined by Tommy Orange. And the reader learns what happened at the end of There There, which was an abrupt bur inexorable cliffhanger of a finale.

Tommy Orange also talks about the paradox of the 1924 citizenship bestowed upon Indian tribes in the U.S., how the citizenship was a euphemism for dissolving tribes, dissolve being another word for disappearance, “a kind of chemical word for a gradual death of tribes and Indians, a clinical killing, designed by psychopaths calling themselves politicians.��

“Citizenship being granted will be a kind of victory too, because you will not have died in any of the wars or massacres, you will have survived starving and relocation, indoctrination and assimilation, you will have lasted long enough that they had to say that you too, our longtime, once mortal enemy, even you are one of us, even if its meanings, its rights, won’t come for decades, the seed will have become there, in the year you were born.��

Tommy Orange put the Natives in Oakland, California on the consequential map; Orange is a national treasure. Keep on writing for us, for everyone, for your tribe, for your culture, and for those outside your culture. We are all connected. If TT was a 5 (yes, it was), then this is a 7, even though we don’t have the stars we can assign for it. We are wandering stars, all of us.

I want to add another favorite quote of mine from this book:

“Everything about your life will feel impossible. And you being or becoming an Indian will feel the same. Nevertheless you will be an Indian and an American ad a woman and a human wanting to belong to what being human means.��

A massive thank you to Knopf for sending me this book without my even asking. You must have known it was written for me, a white, Caucasian, Jewish girl from Boston. I feel just a little bit Native American Oakland Californian after reading this masterpiece.