Tommy Orange on His "There There" Sequel

The Book Review

The New York Times

Books, Arts

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 1 March 2024

⏱️ 38 minutes

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Summary

Tommy Orange’s acclaimed debut novel, “There There” centered on a group of characters who all converge on an Indigenous powwow in modern-day Oakland, Calif. His follow-up, “Wandering Stars,” is both a prequel and a sequel to that book. This week, Orange visits the podcast to discuss his new work as well as the book he has read most in his life, Clarice Lispector's "The Hour of the Star."

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the Book Review
0:12.1	Podcast. On this week's episode, I'm Book Review, and this is the Book Review podcast.
0:13.6	On this week's episode, I'm joined by Tommy Orange, author of the new novel Wandering Stars.
0:19.7	Six years ago, he published his tremendous debut, There There There, a polyphonic look at a dozen Native American
0:26.0	characters, all living in modern day Oakland, California.
0:30.0	There There There was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in fiction and maybe as importantly.
0:35.0	Who's to say?
0:36.0	It was also one of the New York Times' 10 best books of the year.
0:40.0	The new book, Wandering Stars, is a sequel. It picks up with some of the characters who we left off with at the dramatic end of There There There, which spoiler alert we talk about just a little bit, but it also goes back in time to their ancestors in the aftermath of the
0:55.4	1864 Sand Creek Massacre. Tommy Orange, welcome to the Book Review Podcast.
1:00.9	I thank you so much for having me, Gilbert.
1:04.0	Tell us about Wandering Stars.
1:06.0	Okay, so Wandering Stars is different names that I've heard in the copy for the book and based on the initial reactions to it people are calling it a
1:16.0	sequel and a prequel and a follow-up and a standalone and it's this funny thing with how things get
1:22.3	marketed and talked about. I definitely started writing it as a straightforward sequel and so like literally picking up where they're left off, like actually at the Coliseum,
1:34.8	were the final pages of the book where it ends.
1:37.0	But the book became something else.
1:39.5	It took me six years to write.
1:41.2	We start off all the way back in 1864, the Sand Creek Massacre, there's a young
1:46.3	man fleeing that scene. And that comes from a family story. How my dad got his name is from a similar story, and we end up following generations
1:57.2	all the way until we get to Orville Red Feather, and that's a family from, his family is a family from there there and so we follow this family
2:06.3	line through fleeing from the massacre getting to a prison castle in Florida where Richard Henry Pratt comes up with the idea for the boarding
	...

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