There There by Tommy Orange is an objectively brilliant and subjectively shitty book.

Brilliant because it’s about as refined and politically correct as a bucketful of human flesh splattering against your face. Most chapters cut the reader’s soul open, shove a fist inside, grab something valuable and squeeze. The characters are different yet connected, and every story is sincere.

It’s shitty, at least for me, because it’s completely focused on what reality is without room for what it can be and how we get there. Tommy succeeded in letting me feel what life is like for a Native Indian in urban USA, but to me all art must be life-affirming. A book must show that there is more to gain by living, more to lose by dying. There must be a celebration of life, and this book didn’t provide any hope for me. It is an outcry of a people who had everything taken from them and who are mostly without voice, but it’s also distilled pain in literary form, and I have to ask what I gain from reading it. I hurt plenty without it and it doesn’t give me any new information. And I try to live by a simple rule: do only things that make me happy or help me learn. This book, at best, can make Native Indians happy because of their voice finally reaching ears. It can also make those Americans who have preferred to completely forget that Native Indians remember.

I’m in neither of these groups, but at least I enjoyed the book as a writer. The style is brilliant.

P.S. It didn’t bother me much, but I have to mention that the text suffers from the desire to be Art with a capital A. Point of view shifts constantly between chapters, style fluctuates from short clipped sentences, to sweeping descriptive passages, to non-fiction language. It’s unnecessary. Yes, it helps differentiate the characters, but Tommy Orange is brilliant at dialogue and extremely insightful, so he doesn’t need questionable stylistic tricks to keep the text from slipping into monotone. Still, the writing is good, so this is not too distracting.