The title of There There comes from a comment from the Modernist writer Gertrude Stein, who upon returning to her childhood home of Oakland after many years and finding it much changes, wrote: "There is no there there." Tommy Orange has commented that the quote spoke to him in terms of "the idea of having a place that is yours-land that you have a relationship to-then being removed and what that does to you, as a Native experience. The interconnected segments of There There, and the ways in which they build to a larger climax, are reminiscent of great novels-in-stories such as Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout and A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. Tommy Orange himself has cited the work of Native poet Layli Long Soldier (author of Whereas) and his IAIA classmate Terese Mailhot ( Heart Berries) as contemporary inspirations, but his work has drawn comparisons to the writing of celebrated novelist Louise Erdrich ( Love Medicine, The Round House) and controversial but canonical Spokane writer Sherman Alexie ( The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian). In Tommy Orange’s There There, an ambitious meditation on identity and its broken alternatives, on myth filtered through the lens of time and poverty and urban life, on tradition all the more. Part IV: Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield (5).Part IV: Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield (4).Part IV: Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield (3).Part III: Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield (2).Part I: Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield (1).
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