![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The book steers clear of the antique romance of the open plains for that, as Orange wryly notes: “we have… Kevin Costner saving us, John Wayne slaying us an Italian guy named Iron Eyes Cody playing our parts in movies”. Orange, himself a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, deals not just with several centuries of oppression of the Native American community (which a brief, dryly witty prologue deals with in a devastatingly matter-of-fact way), but how rites and tradition can seem comically anachronistic in a world of “glass, metal, rubber, and wires, the speed, the hurtling masses” in which “the city took us in”. The novel centres on the interconnected lives of a group of Native Americans – or Indians, as they call themselves, determined to reclaim a term more often used disparagingly. Oakland happens also to be Orange’s home town and provides the setting for the book, which has attracted many admiring reviews in the US. T he title of Tommy Orange’s bold debut novel is a reference to Gertrude Stein’s line about the city of her childhood, Oakland, California: “there is no there there”, she wrote. ![]()
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