Blunt and visceral, “There There” jumps between a cast of largely Native American characters as Oakland prepares for a big powwow. In crafting these voices, Tommy Orange shares stories of trauma, addiction and good-old twenty-first century anxiety, all while exploring the larger, impossible theme of “what it means” to be Native American.

On the whole, the cast of the novel isn’t doing that well. Even the best of the bunch are trying to find the energy to lose weight and get out of mom’s basement or trudging the same mail route they’ve had for decades while trying to scrape enough cash together to raise three step-grandkids. Others are barely holding on: they’re shakily sober, selling drugs or trying to figure out how to pay back large sums of cash to seriously shady people.

Orange gives us chapters devoted to each member of his cast as the book progresses, moving forward and backward through time, seeing lives cross and reconnect. His phrasing is direct–overly direct as the novel starts, like a conversation you might overhear on the bus.

I found myself longing for more lyrical passages, but I also found myself drawn in as I spent time with the characters. The flatness of the voices seems almost like a protective facade as we learn more about their hopes and failings and, most notably, the deep disappointments etched into their lives.

Everything builds to the powwow, and the book earns its explosive finale. Orange shows us an example of the trauma that has marked his characters’ lives, but he does so without cheapening it.

Quotes

“I’m twenty-one now, which means I can drink if I want. I don’t though. The way I see it, I got enough when I was a baby in my mom’s stomach. Getting drunk in there, a drunk fucking baby, not even a baby, a little fucking tadpole thing, hooked up to a cord, floating in a stomach.”

---

“‘Listen, baby, it makes me happy you want to know, but learning about your heritage is a privilege. A privilege we don’t have. And anyway, anything you hear from me about your heritage does not make you more or less Indian. More or less a real Indian. Don’t ever let anyone tell you what being Indian means. Too many of us died to get just a little bit of us here, right now, right in this kitchen. You, me. Every part of our people that made it is precious. You’re Indian because you’re Indian because you’re Indian,” she said, ending the conversation by turning back around to stir.”

---

“Jacquie isn’t listening anymore. She always finds it funny, or not funny but annoying actually, how much people in recovery like to tell old drinking stories. Jacquie didn’t have a single drinking story she’s want to share with anyone. Drinking had never been fun. It was a kind of solemn duty. It took the edge off, and it allowed her to say and do whatever she wanted without feeling bad about it.”

A gripping post-apocalyptic tale, “Station Eleven” skillfully captures the collapse and aftermath of “the Georgia flu.”

Author Emily St. John Mandel adds a welcome wrinkle, though, in introducing the Traveling Symphony into the world after. She places us among a troupe of actors and musicians who loop around Michigan’s mitten, entertaining the small communities that remain with Shakespeare and symphonies while dodging cults and creeps trying to Mad Max their well through the End Times.

By placing us with the Symphony, and using flashbacks to conjure the connected lives of an actor, an artist, a paparazzo and other creative types, St. John Mandel conjures something more literary than your standard post-disaster fare. As the Traveling Symphony’s motto (lifted from Star Trek) reminds us, “survival is insufficient.”

Her characters are sensitive, vulnerable, and often flawed. She does a good job showing us how their heartbreaks and imperfections made them the people they now are, even as the flu, with its 99% mortality rate, made the world we see in these pages.

The interconnections between the characters are deftly drawn, but I did find my disbelief strained as the different threads overlapped at the book’s conclusion. St. John Mandel also cheats a little to undermine the darker ending the book seemed to be building toward. Still, “Station Eleven” was an exciting, engaging read.

Quotes

“This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret. He had done some things he wasn’t proud of. If Miranda was so unhappy in Hollywood, why hadn’t he just taken her away from there? It wouldn’t have been difficult. The way he’d dropped Miranda for Elizabeth and Elizabeth for Lydia and let Lydia slip away to someone else. The way he’d let Tyler be taken to the other side of the world. The way he’d spent his entire life chasing after something, money or frame or immortality or all of the above. He didn’t really even know his only brother. How many friendships had he neglected until they’d faded out? On the first night of previews, he’d barely made it off the stage. On the second night, he’d arrived on the platform with a strategy. He stared at his crown and ran through a secret list of everything that was good.”

Set in the heart of the pandemic, Hari Kunzru’s “Blue Ruin” is a meditation on a life in art, exploring the hazy spectrum between compromising, committing, quitting.

Our title character, Jay, seems like he belongs in that last bin as we start the novel. He’s delivering groceries and sleeping out of his car, still sick from an early bout of COVID that got him kicked out of his New York City squat.

Fulfilling an order at a cozy estate upstate, he recognizes an old face behind a mask. It’s his ex, Alice. They haven’t seen each other in decades, but seeing his condition, she practically drags him to crash at an old barn tucked away on the site. It’s an impulsive act of kindness, one that triggers a reevaluation of their art-school days in late ’90s London–and possibly a reckoning too.

Alice, it turns out, is married to Rob. Now a well-known painter, Rob is formerly an art school friend/rival of Jay’s…and the man she left him for. As Jay recovers, we discover how the group met, flashing back to squats and hash and the jousting of young egos before returning to the diminished circumstances of May 2020.

Kunzru does a good job evoking the excitement of the past and the dual slog of the pandemic and middle age. Jay can’t stay hidden on the estate forever. The absentee tech-guru owner has a state-of-the-art security system that’s eventually called into service. When Jay finally meets the rest of the pod taking shelter there–Rob, art-dealer Marshall and Marshall’s girlfriend, Nicole–the drama deepens.

Can Jay’s appearance really be a coincidence? What has he done since he disappeared decades ago? Is Jay still making art? And can Rob get his act together to finish some paintings before his family, and possibly Marshall, go broke?

As a COVID-era novel set among an isolated upstate crew of creatives, “Blue Ruin” can’t help but be compared to Gary Shteyngart’s, “Lake Success,” a much funnier book covering similar terrain. Still, Kunzru does strong work capturing the dichotomies of the art world. One scene conveys the absurdity of scrabbling for sales; another convinces you that a life lived for art may be worth the sacrifice.

Kunzru’s characters feel more like “types” than individuals. This is the kind of book where people say things like, “So there we are, another white man wanting to burn down the world to salvage his fragile ego.” Each role is structured to illustrate a point the author wants to make, and it feels on the nose, even if it’s not necessarily off the mark.

This makes sense, though, because “Blue Ruin” is a book of ideas: about art and striving, rich kids and poor kids, what happens when we succeed and what happens when we fail. It’s engaging and well crafted, particularly if you’re interested in the underlying concept.

Quotes

“There are really only two kinds of artist. You’re either an intellectual or a savage, and you don’t really have a choice about which. Rob was a savage, of course. He liked to approach making things in the manner of a hominid discovering tools. What you have to do, he said, is paint like you’ve never painted before, like you’re seeing color for the first time. I did my best to emulate him, but it was no good. For me, making art was inescapably cerebral. I approached it as a problem, a puzzle that I needed to solve. I was ashamed of that. It felt like a dirty secret, a creative weakness that I had to hide.”

***

“Alice’s competence had survived even the last year of our relationship, when we were actively trying to crash and burn, to let ourselves go to hell. It was a kind of weakness in her. If you’re a problem-solver, sooner or later people learn that they can bring their problems to you, and after that you’re never free.”

***

“She was a rich person, used to interactions in which she was respected, even courted. On the rare occasion when her status wasn’t recognized–by some official or service provider–it was, I imagined, a memorable outrage. She’d find it hard to understand that I had no relationship with the company outside terms set by the app. It was designed that way. Even if you stayed on the phone for hours and finally got to speak to someone in a far-away call center, they had no agency. You could never appeal to anyone’s humanity.”

***

“To twenty-something me, an artist was primarily someone who was trying not to get captured. The world was dominated by the interests of the rich and powerful. It was organized to lure you, to trick you into their service. An artist ought, I thought, to live like a spy, a spiritual fugitive. Art itself consisted of finding ways to say no, to become invisible to power. Only then could an artwork have any claim to authenticity. Even if you found it difficult, or it caused friction with others, it was necessary to refuse entanglements, because they were a way to force you to conform. When I wouldn’t speak to anyone and locked myself in my studio, I was holding a line, taking my vocation seriously. In practical terms, it amounted to the same thing. Rob and I both expected other people to pick up after us. Of the two of us, I was probably the more self-righteous about it.”

***

“‘The artworld likes nothing better than someone who doesn’t seem to want it. That’s always been my problem. They can smell it on me. It’s a dirty smell.'”

Daniel Clowes’ “Monica” is rich and confounding, an artful comic exploring what it’s like to seek but never fully find.  

It’s told in vignettes centering on the title character, a girl whose mother gets caught up in the counterculture and ends up abandoning her. Monica spends much of her life trying to figure out that act. Even in what should be a successful adulthood, she remains trapped in the past, snared by the need to understand what happened to her mother, and by extension, to her.

This quest is anything but straightforward. There are hippie cults, Lovecraftian figures, ghost radios and vague intimations of some apocalyptic event. But there’s also the normal stuff of life: ex-boyfriends, aimless youth, the possibilities of late-life romance. To complicate things further, Monica is prone to writing stories, and some of these fictional accounts enter the narrative, weird little sections in the vein of old Creepy Comics or the “Tales of the Black Freighter” interludes in Watchmen.

Clowes is assured at capturing it all, from cult derangement to edge-of-apocalypse noir to the day-to-day vibes of just never quite fitting in. I found the least fantastical scenes the most engaging. My heart sank with each dippy new lover Monica’s mom takes on; when Monica meets a man she can share her stories with, I was eager for her “October” romance to work out.

The art is excellent throughout, detailed, expressive, carefully blocked and plotted. Clowes’ lines are precise and fine, like something John Severin might offer. But the story itself resists easy explanation. I typically resist ambiguity in this vein, but Clowes is so assured and intentional with what he offers here that I ended up being captivated instead.

An engrossing work of historical fiction, David Mitchell’s “Utopia Avenue” blends “Behind the Music” mythmaking with intriguing light fantasy elements.

Set largely in Britain in the mid-1960s, the novel is a telling of how its titular band makes it. Utopia Avenue doesn’t form organically but is cobbled together by a Canadian producer possibly looking at his last shot overseas.

It includes several musical archetypes: the guitar god, the rowdy drummer, the folk songstress, the working-class bass player with a knack for hooks. Mitchell interweaves actual musical figures from the period, including David Bowie, Brian Jones (a fun, damaged presence), Jimi Hendrix, several stars overseas. Taking real figures and putting fictional words in their mouths can be a dodgy enterprise, but it largely works here, with the real-life cameos expanding “the scene” and the stakes for the band.

Mitchell walks us through the standard music biopic scenes: the rocky first gig, arguments with the label, an overseas tour. These pieces feel familiar, like musical standards, but he does such a good job evoking the group and their dynamics that it’s exciting to see Utopia Avenue’s progression (as well as the obstacles the author throws in their way).

There are setbacks and tragedies–enough to make the book a brisk read. But Mitchell also works to capture the creative energy of making music, the little magic of notes and phrases. This could easily be overdone, full of fluff and sentiment, but he keeps even these conceptual sections focused. They don’t weave off too far into the mystic.

The members of the group are more complex than what we see at the beginning. Abusive childhoods, sexist expectations, autism and asylums: they’re all carefully woven into the narrative, building our sense of who these characters are, what they’re trying to accomplish and why we should care.

There’s even an undertone of fantasy in the mental issues one key character experiences, a storyline that includes some callbacks to other Mitchell books as well as a deep dive into what’s basically magic. I found it fascinating; your mileage may vary.

Even with that caveat, Utopia Avenue’s story feels complete and creative and varied. It’s an accomplishment, one that makes me want to dive back into Mitchell’s earlier works.

Quotes

“Dean never saw the point of church. ‘God works in mysterious ways’ seemed no different from ‘Head I win, tails you lose.'”

***

“‘Our persecutors maintain that’–Francis sighs the word, regretfully– ‘”homosexuals” violate Nature’s law. A decrepit falsehood. Nature’s law is oblivion. Youth and vigor are fleeting aberrations. This truth is the canvas on which I paint.'”

***

“‘Amsterdam won’t be the same without you.’

‘Bless you, but Amsterdam won’t notice a damn thing. The city’s changed since we stayed up late redesigning the future and crashing the royal wedding.’ “Trix traces her forefinger along Jasper’s clavicle. “Remember the free white bicycles? Nobody repairs them now. People think, Why can’t somebody else do it? Or they paint them black and lock ’em up. Provo is winding down. New revolutionaries have grabbed the megaphones. Humorless ones. The ones who quote Che Guevara like he’s a close personal friend. “It is better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” They’ll say, “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs,” as if a demonstrator’s spine, or a policeman’s skull, or an elderly widow’s window is only an egg.'”

***

“‘A brain constructs a model of reality. If that model isn’t too different from most people’s model, you’re labeled sane. If the model is different, you’re labeled a genius, a misfit, a visionary, or a nutcase. In extreme cases, you’re labeled a schizophrenic and locked up.”

***

“‘I’m in no mad rush.’

‘Good for you. The word “faster” is becoming a synonym of “better.” As if the goal of human evolution is to be a sentient bullet.”