We Are All in 2005's Crash

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Whenever I finish a book or experience a piece of media or literature that particularly engages or touches me, I always go on a full press tour for that thing, recommending it to everyone around me, even those who are marginally interested. For the most part, most people ignore the recommendation. This is fine. Obviously, in an ideal world, they would take the recommendation, and I have someone I can gush with because they loved it too. But I would rather the recommendation go wholly ignored than have it be picked up only for the person to hate it.

I recommended the Overstory by Richard Powers to some friends in the group chat, one of whom wasn't impressed. "It's just 'crash' for old tree-hugging white hippies" was what I got back. I loved the Overstory, but this response got me thinking about the trope of interconnectedness as a storytelling trope. It DOES seem to be particularly relied on and cheap. Have we really been dunking on this since 2005?

Woven stories are a good way to blend form and content. In the case of the Overstory, which was largely about trees, the connected narratives mimic tree branches growing together in the forest like- you guessed it -an overstory. I happened to think this was neat at the time, but I can see where my friend was coming from. When Crash came out it was kind of a stupid and unbelievable concept that wore itself out quickly because the dumbest people you know thought they were geniuses for Figuring It Out. 

Which is all to say that I'm getting weary of interconnectedness as storytelling, so when I approach a novel like Tommy Orange's There There, it's on uneven footing. I enjoyed Orange's writing; there were parts of his novel that felt Faulkneresque: complicated and even sinister family dynamics, chapters from points of view of a cast of characters that shift the narration style between them, and some truly beautiful prose writing - particularly in the intro and in Thomas Frank's first chapter. 

And then there is Tommy Orange's point of view, which is very present, something I rarely welcome from an author. The originality of urban native stories can't be overstated; it was thought-provoking but not in a stifling way. The book does a great job of featuring the concept as a backdrop, not as a takeaway. This also takes a degree of skill to do as a writer.

So with excellent writing and perspective in There There, what's not to love? Basically, everything else. Orange can craft beautiful sentences, but his characters felt hollow, and the story felt forced. All of his character plotlines interconnect and crash (heh) together at the end. But that's just it, the narratives seem frantically mashed together, to the point that the cross sections are unconvincing, even eye-rollingly unbelievable at times. 

Some of the characters and plot points in the novel build, but a lot of them fail to go anywhere or elicit any sympathy. One of the novel's female characters, Blue, has a singular chapter devoted to her escaping a domestic violence situation. There was some real weight to the chapter but it was also incomplete. It was hard to bring myself to care about Blue again and again when her connections to the other characters in the novel were unbelievably tenuous and her origin story, which WAS harrowing, was hardly a blip on the timeline. I wanted to care about this character, but I could not get the sympathy meter to sustain. I shouldn't have to work so hard to care for your characters!

No spoilers per se, but sympathy is something you need an abundance of at the end of this novel for the "punch" to pack anything. Which is another thing, the ending was wildly unconvincing, violence for the sake of it. And again, I'm not spoiling anything, the ending was increasingly predictable and equally observable as about to be really bad. Like watching a car crash in slow motion, I kept thinking there was no way Orange was about to do what I thought he was going to do. When the book finally ended, I couldn't imagine Orange expected the reader to feel as stoic as I did. 

I don't want to hate There There. I think Tommy Orange is a great writer and has incredible things to say. I'm mostly disappointed in the way the characters and plotting of the novel just didn't do justice to the author's style. Maybe I just need a break from the loosely connected characters colliding in the universe. Although I'm sure it'll find me again soon.