Orange is back with a hypnotic new novel
Wandering Stars Tommy Orange Knopf
Six years have passed since Tommy Orange published his debut novel, There There, but the echoes of that story still reverberate in the minds of those who read it. A member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, Orange's fiction explores the complex challenges faced by people struggling to understand their identity within a dominant culture determined to bleach and sentimentalize the past.
During one of many poignant moments in Orange's new novel, Wandering Stars, an Indigenous woman goes to a public library in the late 1950s and asks “what novels are written by Indian people.” The librarian tells her she “doesn't think there are any.” Sixty years later, an Indian boy wonders “why there weren't any Native American superheroes.” His older brother laments that he and his family “weren't connected to the tribe or to their language or with the knowledge that other people had about being Native.”
This is the story of that family, their history and the enervating effects of being cut off from it.
The story opens with “America's longest war,” more than 300 years of conflict in which Indigenous Americans were massacred, starved and, euphemistically, “removed.” One of those Indigenous people is a child named Jude Star. In 1864, he barely survives the Sand Creek massacre and goes mute in response to the trauma.
To avoid starvation, he eventually turns himself over to U.S. soldiers and gets shipped off to a prison in Florida.
There, trapped in a program of cultural annihilation, Jude begins his conflicted relationship with white society under the tutelage of a jailer named Richard Henry Pratt, an actual historical figure who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Determined to eradicate “their blanket ways,” Pratt practised a toxic benevolence based on the principle of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.”
Taught to read and write, Jude is seduced by Western classics, and he finds the Bible particularly fascinating, especially its strange echoes of Cheyenne stories. What really perplexes him are the contradictory demands of his conquerors: Jude is told to eradicate everything about himself, yet he's also required to represent “the vanishing race.”
As Wandering Stars sweeps through the decades, Orange gathers up moments of love and despair in stories that demonstrate what a piercing writer he is. About halfway through the novel, we arrive in 2018. Here, Orange flares his wings and touches down for good in the home of Orvil Red Feather, the teenager wounded at the climax of There There.
The shift in pacing and structure — moving from a collection of connected short stories to a novella — gives Orange the space to explore the lives of other people in Orvil's life. It's not too early to say that Orange is building a body of literature that reshapes the Indigenous story in the United States. Book by book, he's correcting the dearth of Native stories even while depicting the tragic cost of that silence.