Hear Hear!

There There a novel by Tommy Orange.  Vintage.  292 pp. $16.00 ****1/2

This novel is as good as everyone says it is, and that’s saying a lot: it’s been hyped by everyone from Pam Houston (who was apparently Orange’s writing teacher) to President Obama, who has called it one of his favorite books.  It is a remarkable tour de force: told from a variety of viewpoints, and with various narrative techniques (first person, third person, second), and every one of them rings true.  The writing is vivid and lively, and describes a group of people I knew nothing about: Native Americans who live in present-day Oakland, California, and are trying to pull together their lives under a variety of difficulties: poverty, substance abuse, neglect, and scorn from the outside world.  It doesn’t read like a sociological study, as it might have.  It is a work of art.  And it showed me a slice of life I wasn’t aware of.

Among my favorite characters is a fourteen-year-old boy named Orvil Red Feather, who is just as up on things as any other kid his age but is also interested in his heritage and planning to dance at the Big Oakland Powwow, which is the unifying event for all the characters.  Orvil is in a generation so far removed from me that I have little understanding of who they are and how they live.  He and his two younger brothers live in poverty but all have nice I-Phones, have acquired nice bikes (Orvil got paid two hundred bucks for telling his story to an oral historian, and thereby was able to get a bike for his youngest brother), and they travel around Oakland as if they own the place, riding their bikes and listening to music on their earbuds.  But they’re all listening to different things (one of the boys listens to classical music), and I suddenly realized that, whether I like it or not, that’s the way kids live these days.  They have their phones, they have their earbuds, and they spend their lives perpetually tuned out to the world around them.  That’s what these guys want.  To be like everyone else.

Orvil’s grandmother Jackie is a substance abuse counselor whose own sobriety is shaky and day-to-day; she was a child when her mother took her to Alcatraz in 1970 to participate in the Native American occupation of the land.  Her sister Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield is also a character, as are Dene Oxendene, the documentary filmmaker who paid Orvil for his story; Edwin Black, a biracial young man who has dreams of being a writer but has become addicted to the Internet, finally found a job as an intern for the pow wow; Tony Loneman, a huge hulk of a guy who was born with fetal alcohol syndrome and now deals drugs.  These people are not types.  They’re fully developed characters.  Each one of their stories, though part of the whole, is fascinating in itself.

The section that most impressed me concerned Octavio Gomez, the drug dealer for whom Tony and other characters work.  He had become the villain of the piece for me—drug use is a massive problem in this population—and I was all set to hate him.  Yet his story is as moving and sympathetic as anyone else’s, and impressed me so much that, after I read it the first time, I sat down and read it again.  I’d read a whole novel about this man.

He lives in a family where his brother and his uncle more or less brought about his father’s death, but everything is so convoluted and screwed up that he doesn’t know what to think about it.  His grandmother helps him set up a medicine box—with the fur of a live badger—to help him deal with his demons, and the conversation they have as they are driving back from getting that fur could stand as a coda for the whole book.  He’s explaining what has happened to his grandmother, and she responds.

“’We all fuck up,’” she says.  ‘”It’s how we come back from it that matters.’

“’I don’t know what the fuck I’m supposed to do then.  I can’t get him back, I can’t get them back.  I don’t know what the fuck any of this is about.’

“’You’re not supposed to,’ she said. . .  . That’s the way this whole thing is set up . .  ‘You’re not ever supposed to know.  Not all the way.  That’s what makes the whole thing work the way it does.  We can’t know.  That’s what makes us keep going.’”

By “this whole thing” in that final paragraph, I believe the grandmother was referring to human existence.  And when she said, “We all fuck up,” I didn’t take her to be talking about Native Americans.  She was talking about the human race.

The novel ends in disaster, though we can see it coming from early on.  It’s a Bridge of San Luis Rey type plot; you get to know people only to find out that some of them were victims of a disaster.  At first I wondered whether that was just a novice writer’s answer for a way to end his book.[1]  Yet the final scene is so remarkably written, and so vivid, so daring, that it was obviously the story for Tommy Orange to tell.  How does such a young man know so much? one wonders.  About the lives of all these different people, and what it is to live through a disaster?  That’s one of the mysteries of the novelistic imagination.  Tommy Orange, as the expression goes, is a writer we’ll be hearing from.  But even if he never writes another thing, he’s written one hell of a novel.

[1] A friend of mine once pointed out to me, when we were young aspiring writers, that John O’Hara’s first two novels both ended in suicide, and he thought those were cheap endings, an easy way for the writer to enter the novel.  I thought the whole point was that he was writing about future suicides.  But my friend had a point.