Tommy Orange There There

The Avid Reader Show

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Tommy Orange author of There There published just last week by Knopf. Tommy is a recent graduate of the MFA program at The Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 Macdowell Colony Fellow and a 2016 writing by writers fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma. There There is an ensemble book, in some ways, reminding me of movies like Robert Altman’s Nashville where you have this large cast of characters, seemingly unrelated to the other but as the book progresses their paths begin to cross and they edge closer to each other until the reader recognizes the total connection between each and everyone of them. The most difficult thing about this process is holding each of these people in your head and then clearly see and follow the paths they take. This is what Tommy Orange has accomplished in There There. This cast of characters, an aspiring documentary filmmaker, a boy who teaches himself traditional Native American dance by watching YouTube, another morbidly obese man lost in his own challenge. Well I guess they’re all lost in their own challenges. These are just a couple of the twelve, really over twelve characters that propel this book to its final and overwhelming climax.