Tommy Orange’s ‘Wandering Stars’ is ‘Hella’ Good
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Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange’s follow-up novel to his 2018 debut There There, tells the story of the Indigenous experience in America from a unique perspective. Things begin with Jude Star, a survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, which saw U.S. soldiers open fire on Arapaho and Cheyenne civilians, killing a couple hundred, many of them women, children and elderly. Star is sent by train with other Cheyenne people from Oklahoma to Florida, where he spent years in what he calls a “prison-castle.”
There are boarding schools for Indigenous children, where they are stripped of their Native-American backgrounds and forced to assimilate. Kill the Indian, Save the Man is the name given to one such campaign.
The story advances to sisters Opal Bear Shield and Jacquie Red Feather, raising Jacquie’s grandsons in Oakland in current times following the death of the boys’ addicted mother, with Jacquie trying to stay sober and responsible. The boys are Orvil, Loother and Lony.
Opal, Jacquie and Orvil appear in There There, a novel about various American Indian characters planning to attend the Big Oakland Powwow in Oakland. Orvil hoped to do a traditional dance at the event, and is shot by robbers aiming to steal at the Powwow.
There There ended up being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In Wandering Stars, Orvil is dealing with the trauma from the shooting, and it affects his entire family. He’s a bright and engaging teen, and a talented musician, but there are painkillers involved in his recovery, and one can imagine what that might lead to.
As it was in There There, addiction is a major theme in Wandering Stars, and a crushing one at that. Alcohol. Pills. Heroin. Blanx, which you never heard of, because Orvil’s best friend Sean’s father manufactures the drug in his basement, and Orvil essentially moves in with Sean.
Orvil is a heckuva character, and Wandering Stars really picks up when the focus is on him and his family. He, Loother and Lony are, in fact, all very engaging characters, the type that perhaps could even carry a novel as a main character. Orvil certainly could.
One hears the term “hella” quite a bit from the Red Feather brothers, Norcal teen slang meaning a lot, or very, or extremely.
It’s the story of Orvil, the oldest son, who carries much of Wandering Stars. “I didn’t even remember what happened when I OD’d. I woke up in the hospital with my whole family around me,” Orange writes. “It seemed forever before, that first time I woke up in the hospital with them all around me, like there was a version of me who actually died the day of the powwow and another version of me took over. Or it was like I was born that day as someone new.
I feel like I’m still trying to get back to who I used to be.”
Orange presages the addiction theme with a line in the book before it begins: For anyone surviving and not surviving this thing called and not called addiction.
Wandering Stars offers a unique approach. There’s a family tree in the beginning, not far from Orange’s line about addiction, that begins with Jude and Hannah Star, and Bird Woman and Victoria Bear Shield. It continues for a number of generations, to Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and Jacquie Red Feather, and then Orvil, Loother and Lony.
The stories in the first half, before things transition to the Red Feather boys, are very interior, without much dialogue. Orange writes lively dialogue, and I felt things opened up when the story narrators got out of their own heads.
It all makes for a good, maybe even very good book. Wandering Stars, which came out this year, has a strong 3.91 rating, out of 5, on GoodReads, with some 15,000 readers weighing in. A review in the NY Times called the book “a towering achievement.”
The review continues, “It’d be a mistake to think that the power of Wandering Stars lies solely in its astute observations, cultural commentary or historical reclamations, though these aspects of the novel would make reading it very much worthwhile. But make no mistake, this book has action! Suspense! The characters are fully formed and they get going right out of the gate.”
Orange is a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes. He teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and was born and raised in Oakland.
Oakland is almost as much a theme in Wandering Stars as addiction. At one point, Opal and Jacquie take a walk around a park in the city. Opal tells her sister, “Oakland is always trying to be better. Even if it doesn’t get there. And people are always messing with it. But it never stops trying.”
Journalist Michael Malone lives in Hawthorne with his wife and two children.
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