REVIEW of tommy orange’s Wandering Stars by Hugh Blanton
Intergenerational novels can be among the most pleasurable and engrossing stories to read (see Proulx, see Michener). There’s a tremendous amount of painstaking research involved to accurately convey the change and progression of time, place, and people as one generation passes to the next. Antecedent characters sometimes don’t even speak the same language or have the same customs as their descendants, requiring a great amount of skill and knowledge from the author to keep his facts straight and write an accurate story. Often a complete family tree extending over a century back in time is diagrammed right inside the book’s front cover. It should go without saying that tyros and amateurs need not apply. Well, as it turns out, it does need to be said.
Wandering Stars is the latest novel from Tommy Orange and it’s a hot mess. Our story begins with an attack by the US Army on the Indian village at Sand Creek in the Colorado Territory in 1864. The attack comes at dawn suddenly and without warning. In the chaos and panic a woman tells her grandson to get on a horse and run, also shoving a small boy at him to take along. The grandson is close enough to the battle to see blood spatter as people are shot. He even sees his own grandmother go down; not sure if she was shot, fell, or was playing dead. The young man and boy make it away on the horse (the young man was wounded in the back as they fled) and then we get a clue as to what we’re in for as far as storytelling goes in the rest of the book—when they camp that first night on the run they had a pile of blankets with them that the grandmother had unbelievably somehow managed to pack during the cavalry attack—an astonishingly lucky break to help the young man and boy survive on the run out in the wilderness. Deux ex machina indeed.
While most readers would be shaking their head in doubt of someone packing for a camping trip during a surprise dawn cavalry attack, they’ll also be shaking their head at Orange’s laughably poor prose. He has some bizarre affinity for pointing with lips: ‘She pointed her lips at a horse’ and ‘his lips pointing the way we were headed’ and ‘pointing my lips back where we’d come from’ and ‘pointed over my shoulder with his lips’ and ‘Opal pointed up to the moon with her lips.’ It could be reasonably assumed that Orange gets his inspiration from duckface selfies.
Wandering Stars is rife with fake profundity. Orange often dons his philosopher/poet hat with eye-rolling results. A character who had been recently introduced to the Christian bible ‘was only privately suspicious about the fact that the Bible itself was not mentioned in the Bible.’ (The Christian bible is an anthology of books that were written long before it was ever anthologized.) ‘He knew something holy was happening to everyone even while life could feel a hell of a lot like hell.’ ‘He just then as if suddenly felt like he belonged to the thing that he was doing, this writing or thinking or being at the page, which felt like both doing and waiting.’ These are the types of sentences/lines philosophers and poets love to use—they sound elegant and profound at first until you realize they’re actually quite meaningless. We also come across the vacuous line ‘the story has to be lived to be told.’ Well, no kidding, Socrates.
Orange includes a family tree at the beginning of the book but it isn’t enough to alleviate the maddening confusion. Multiple characters share the same name and the reader goes several pages thinking they’re reading about one character just to find out it was actually a previous character. There are adoptions and it’s often unclear when we’re reading about a birth parent/grandparent or the adoptive ones. Sometimes the story is in first person, sometimes third person, and there’s even an unnamed narrator that addresses the reader directly. In addition to all the confusion the reader is expected to muddle through character’s dreams throughout the book including one where ‘Everything smelled bad in the dream, especially Jesus…’
James Michener’s ambition and boldness was on full display in his intergenerational novel Hawaii. Readers were asked to bring a lot to its immense scope covering centuries—and they were rewarded with a well written story and a good history lesson. And in history, at least, Wandering Stars does succeed. Double checking does show Orange’s historical facts to be accurate, he’s obviously done his research. However, in crafting a captivating story he falls well short of the mark. Orange came to writing later in life than most novelists, he was trained in sound arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts and it wasn’t until after a short stint working in a book store that he decided to become a writer. He hasn’t had enough literary experience yet to be able to avoid cliches (‘a lifetime of struggle and heartache’), to write realistic scenes (a pregnant woman lifts a dead man off the ground and throws him onto the back of a horse), and avoid trending popular misgivings (blaming drug/alcohol addiction on colonization). He also has no idea how boring it is for a reader to have to wade through the play by play of a Friday night dominoes game on a kitchen table.
Wandering Stars is a sequel/prequel to Orange’s first novel There There. A few characters reappear here, the thread of cultural commentary continues, and the theme of pain, addiction, and injury repeats. What it means to be called ‘Indian’ is explored when one character discovers he is part Native American after a 23 and Me test and an extensive internet search. Much of the dialogue and inner thoughts read like self-help homilies and Orange would do well to study Denis Johnson when it comes to writing characters with drug addiction. Wandering Stars works its way from whiskey barrels stolen from a horse wagon a century and a half ago to fentanyl produced in a suburban home basement today. The theme of family here is only an underlying one—it’s drowned in the overdramatization of addiction and the accompanying long paragraphs of wailing guff.
Wandering Stars
by Tommy Orange, 315 pages
Alfred A. Knopf, $29.00
THE END
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