NATIVE SON
Novelist Tommy Orange highlights a group of urbanites we seldom hear about.
IN 1935, WHEN GERTRUDE STEIN returned to Oakland, California, for the first time in decades, she stopped by her childhood home to find the big house and the eucalyptus trees and the rose hedge she remembered all gone. “There is no there there,” she later wrote in Everybody’s Autobiography, a phrase for which she (and, unfairly, Oakland itself) would long be remembered.
Author Tommy Orange uses Stein’s words to evoke a different sort of erasure in There There, his debut novel, out in June. The book’s 12 main characters, like its 36-year-old author, are Native American—their ancestral
