To begin, a clarification: Tommy Orange’s new novel, Wandering Stars, is not a sequel to his 2018 debut, There There. Yes, the two of them are linked, revolving around an overlapping set of characters. Yes, we discover what happened in the aftermath of the shooting at the Big Oakland Powwow, which concluded the earlier work. Orange, however, has more on his mind than mere continuation. He is not interested in return. Rather, he means to take us backward and forward, to stake out a broadly ambitious fictional territory encompassing seven generations, through which he might explore the complications and the consolations of heritage.
Imagine, then, Oakland’s Fruitvale Avenue, where “Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and her boys, and now Jacquie Red Feather,…all live,” as a variation on Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County. “The neighborhood is not that deep into East Oakland,” Orange elaborates, by way of orientation, “but not near Lake Merritt either, a kind of central East Oakland sometimes called the middle extent, because most of Oakland is East Oakland, but to ask anyone where they live in Oakland, if asked, they might just say they live in the Dimond.”
None of this should be surprising; There There was ambitious, as well. The novel, which was a Pulitzer finalist and the November 2021 selection of the California Book Club, featured a dozen point-of-view characters to suggest the diasporic scope of Northern California’s Urban Indians: both the Ohlone, First People of the region, and others who came by choice or circumstance.
“An Urban Indian,” Orange writes in There There, “belongs to the city, and cities belong to the earth.”
Such a sentence might serve as an epigraph, of a kind, for Wandering Stars, although the city doesn’t come in right away. Instead, Orange opens the novel during the 19th century, with the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, in which as many as 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho were slaughtered by a unit of the Colorado Cavalry. Among those who escape is a mute boy named Jude, who narrates the opening section of the book. Jude will become, as Wandering Stars develops, his own sort of First People, progenitor of a line that will ultimately lead to Fruitvale, and the travails his descendants encounter there. The idea (or one of them, at any rate) is to trace the tortured history of Native American genocide and dislocation via a single lineage, and in so doing to redeem or reconstruct it.
“Anything is a story we tell ourselves about a silence,” Orange writes, and it is silence he is seeking to obliterate.
For Orange, such a process is personal and it is collective, and the novel intends to honor both. As he did in There There, he relies in this new novel on a number of narrative strategies, moving from first to third person, past to present, and even, in one chapter, a second-person future tense direct address. The effect is dizzying, kaleidoscopic, and in the first half of Wandering Stars, assured. Jude’s narrative begets that of his son, Charles, who ends up at the infamous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, and Charles’s story begets that of Opal Viola Bear Shield, who will die giving birth to their daughter, Victoria Bear Shield, who will beget Opal and Jacquie, the buildup of generations accruing in these pages like the books of the Bible imposed on Jude by Richard Henry Pratt, the real-life founder of the Carlisle School.
Orange is working toward metaphor here, or a series of metaphors; the novel’s title is drawn from the Epistle of that earlier, biblical Jude: “Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame, wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever.”
Yet equally important is the impulse toward storytelling as a way of connecting (or reconnecting) with ourselves. Each of the major characters—and there are a lot of them—is a storyteller in some form or another: Jude and Charles both writers, Victoria an activist who participates in the 1969–1971 occupation of Alcatraz, and her great-grandson Orvil, last seen wounded during the Powwow shooting, playing music. That none of their work receives distribution or publication is the point.
Public stories, Orange wants us to recognize, are deception; just consider the homilies of the Carlisle School. The manuscripts Jude and Charles leave behind, as a contrast, keep reemerging in the lives of those who come after. In that, they are talismans or touchstones, whispered rumors, or better yet, a set of counter-narratives. “It was one thing,” Opal Bear Shield reflects in 21st-century Oakland, “to be grateful for the ancestors, and another thing to know them on the page.”
At the same time, Wandering Stars wants us to know, even story cannot sustain us. Even story will never be enough. “To endure or pass through endurance test after endurance test,” Opal explains, “only ever gave you endurance test passing abilities. Simply lasting was great for a wall, for a fortress, but not for a person.”
That’s an important observation, especially in regard to the second half of the novel. But this is also where Wandering Stars begins to slip. Among the legacies of the family is addiction: alcohol and morphine at first and later opioids. Substances burn a long fuse from each generation to the next, exploding like a series of fragmentation bombs.
When it comes to the 19th- and early 20th-century material, Orange writes with a certain necessary distance, perhaps because of the divide of time. His language is lyrical, dreamlike. “Most days,” he notes of Charles, “he just let the laudanum do what it would do to him, which he would have trouble remembering later, and hate himself for not being able to stop wiping out his own memory. Sometimes in his effort to get rid of memory, all that was left was the deep past.”
Drugs as another form of obliteration, in other words.
Once Wandering Stars edges into the present, however, addiction begins to feel like a label of sorts, a signifier, more than a disease. Unlike Jude or Charles, who wrestle with it as part of a larger set of challenges, Orvil, for example, remains—despite his interest in music—essentially a pillhead. I understand that as it progresses, addiction becomes all-consuming. That’s not what this is. Instead, it feels like a shorthand, an easy way to categorize.
“Being present,” Orange writes, “doesn’t feel good just because you’re paying attention to it. Matter of fact it can be worse. Better to get distracted. Or high.” That’s true, of course, but at the same time it’s too pat.
We expect more from these characters, and the novel does, as well.
Of course, if Orange is planning, as I hope, to develop a Faulknerian saga, narrative integration may become a very different thing. He hints at such a long game in a pair of brief codas, taking us to the near future, not so much for closure as for new possibilities. “I hope I didn’t stay away too long,” he writes, a whisper that bears larger implications. In such a prayer or supplication, inchoate and essential, a necessary breath of longing is by turns reaffirmed and revealed.•
