Book Review: There There by Tommy Orange

There There by Tommy Orange
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It takes a skilled writer to ferry his readers on a journey alongside not one but multiple narrators and protagonists. Tommy Orange performs the feat in a way that doesn't feel showy or take away from the importance of his subject matter. I went back and counted 11 separate chapter headings that had the names of the central character for each as their titles. There is also another, omniscient narrator who opens the book with a prologue, and provides an "interlude" halfway through.

The effect these multiple perspectives have is to remind the reader that we're looking not at a monolithic "Indian" prototype -- (the Indian Head that used to appear on the test pattern at the end of a television's programming day, back when there was an end) but of a diaspora. What's left in the wake of the genocide carried out on the native people of what's now called North America is a plurality of voices, experiences, and types.

All the characters in Tommy Orange's powerful debut are three-dimensional, and deeply scarred. We witness their struggles against addiction, poverty, and violence, and also toward family, belonging, and love.

If there's a "message" in this book, it's aimed at those who suggest that it's time to move on from the past and stop complaining about the crimes of those who no longer live among us. (Timely, in the face of recent comments by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell)

As Orange says in the interlude:

"When we go to tell our stories, people think we want it to have gone different. People want to say things like 'sore losers' and 'move on already,' 'quit playing the blame game.' But is it a game? Only those who have lost as much as we have see the particularly nasty slice of smile on someone who thinks they’re winning when they say 'Get over it.' This is the thing: If you have the option to not think about or even consider history, whether you learned it right or not, or whether it even deserves consideration, that’s how you know you’re on board the ship that serves hors d’oeuvres and fluffs your pillows, while others are out at sea, swimming or drowning, or clinging to little inflatable rafts that they have to take turns keeping inflated, people short of breath, who’ve never even heard of the words hors d’oeuvres or fluff."

Tommy Orange's "There There" stayed with me in a similar way that the film "Once Were Warriors," about contemporary life among the Maoris in New Zealand did. Yes, it's a tragic tale of the survivors of a Holocaust we rarely discuss, despite its foundational place in our nation's history. But it's also a journey with numerous characters who feel like real people that you might meet along the long road of your own quest for family and for love; for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.


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Book Review: Solo Faces by James Salter

To produce a mighty book, you must choose a mighty theme. No great and enduring volume can ever be written on the flea, though many there be who have tried it.
-- Herman Melville

James Salter's great accomplishment in Solo Faces is that he matches, and sometimes exceeds, the magnitude of his enormous subject matter, through vivid characterizations.

While reading a novel about mountain climbing, I expected I would highlight excerpts about the act of scaling an ascent. And yes, Salter is a good writer, and those passages are harrowing, solidifying in my mind the resolution that I will never, EVER be a mountain climber. But I found myself more struck by descriptions like these:

"She already had a stiffness and hesitation that are part of middle age. Her attention was entirely on her feet. Only the humorous, graceful movements of her hands and her kerchief around her head made her seem youthful."

"He's a strange guy. He's like a searchlight. When he turns your way, he just dazzles you. Afterward, you're left in darkness, you might as well not be alive."

I'm not sure how this book would go over with women. His protagonist, Vernon Rand, has both a voracious sexual appetite and a gnawing misogyny at the core of his interactions with the female characters in the novel. "One woman is like another," he muses at one point. "Two are like another two. Once you begin there is no end." His interest, or "trust" in them, circles back to what is ultimately most important to him -- himself, and that he will somehow live on after his death, in the stories they tell of his accomplishments:

"For some reason he trusted only women and for each of them he assumed a somewhat different pose. They were the bearers of his story, scattered throughout the world."

Solo Faces is one of those books that is so well written, you almost forget you're reading it. For a writer, reading Salter is like taking a sip of cold water from a wellspring on top of a mountain. Yes, the mountains in this book are symbolic, just as the white whale is in Melville. However, this is no more a book about mountains than Moby Dick is a book about whales. In the end, this is a "mighty book" about characters who become real and who make the reader care about them, their choices, accomplishments, challenges and joys.

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Schroder: The American Dream, Gone Horribly Wrong

Schroder by Amity Gaige
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

If you're planning on reading this book, this is where I guess I'm supposed to write the words "spoiler alert," because I plan on discussing how the story plays itself out.  So if you care one way or the other about knowing the resolution of this novel, stop reading my humble review now.

This story of the American Dream gone bad does hold the reader's interest, for the most part.  I did find myself wanting to know what was going to happen to Meadow Kennedy and her fatuous father, Eric.  I'm not sure whether Gaige wanted me to like the protagonist or not.  I can tell you that I didn't.  I found Eric Kennedy/Erik Schroder patently un-likeable.  I wanted things to work out for his little girl, and I found myself wanting Eric to be apprehended.  Maybe he does love Meadow sincerely (albeit difficult to believe any assertions made by a self-proclaimed liar.  It's like Spock's paradox, when he makes Harvey Mudd's fembots blow their perfectly logical circuits, when he tells them in his sexy, knowing way, "Listen carefully:  Everything I say...is a lie."), but even so, Eric is a classic Narcissist, and all roads, even the suffering of his own child, circle back, ultimately, to how it will affect him.

It's unusual to say this, but I liked the book well enough, without liking the main character at all.  If I was supposed to be rooting FOR Schroder/Kennedy, then this novel is an abject failure.  If I was supposed to enjoy his collapse, then Bravo, Amity Gaige.

Not exactly a recommendation, I know.  Read it if you care to.  I'd be interested to hear what you think of it.


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Heft is a Novel That Lingers

Heft by Liz Moore
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

You know you're in the middle of a good book when you find yourself wondering about the characters when you're not reading it.  I did this constantly with Heft.  Just as you think of a friend or lover who has left you after a pleasant evening of the kind of togetherness that reminds you of why they are special, and that makes you feel blessed, this book lingers.

One could argue Heft is a story about loss, despair, and sadness. Undeniably, these are central aspects to the novel.  However, I came away feeling a wonderful lightness -- ironic, when you look at the title.  It's an extremely hopeful book, in the end, about all the ways we continue to live and to love, even in the face of gut-wrenching loss.

There's some lovely writing by Liz Moore, who has managed, at a tender age, to speak in the voices of not one but two flawed and believable characters.  Here, Arthur Opp, over 500 pounds, and lonely in the Park Slope brownstone where he grew up and now lives by himself, at age 59, describes a very particular brand of empathy:

"Here is what I have always thought:  that people, when they eat, are very dear.  The eager lips, the flapping jaws, the trembling release of control -- the guilty glances at one's companions or at strangers.  The focus, the great focus of eating.  The pleasure in it."

Not only is the writing simple and sharp, but the thought is unique, and helps us know Arthur deeply.

The other narrator is an 18 year-old baseball player who is struggling with a loss that fills him with ambivalent emotions.  He comes to a realization that frankly stunned me.  He is 18 and the author who created him is not much older; together, they express an understanding that I came to only recently at a slightly more advanced age.  (Let's just leave it at that.)

"I feel like people are only really dead once you stop learning about them.  This is why it is important to me to keep learning about my mother, and what she wanted, and what her life meant, what she meant by the life she led.  Then she will be alive, somehow, and her wish for me will have come true.  My vow is to learn more about her.  To see her as she saw herself."

I'm excited about Liz Moore.  Hers is the kind of writing that endures, because it is straightforward and moves us, because its characters, and the lives they lead, the emotions they feel, go directly to our hearts, with a pinpoint accuracy that astonishes.  To say I look forward to her next effort is putting it (pardon the pun) lightly.


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