In a Good Way

Among the essays about novels in the Review’s 2024 Fiction Issue—including Anne Enright on John McGahern’s The Pornographer and Michael Gorra on Percival Everett’s James—is a review by Francine Prose of Tommy Orange’s first two books, There There and Wandering Stars. “Deploying the capaciousness and elasticity of the novel form,” Prose writes, “Orange switches back and forth from the intimate to the panoramic, from the present to the past. He can probe deeply into each character’s psyche…. Then he can pull back to give us an overview of the social, political, and economic forces that have helped shape their circumstances and identities, their connections to the wider world.”

Prose has a knack for such crisp and ethically oriented descriptions of a novelist’s work. Since 2007, when her criticism first appeared in our pages, she has brought it to bear on Toni Morrison, Joshua Cohen, Michael Chabon, Arundhati Roy, and, most recently, James Hannaham and Kaveh Akbar. She has also written about war reporting, gun violence, child poverty, and a number of contemporary films.

In addition to nearly two dozen novels and short story collections of her own, Prose has written books about Caravaggio, Anne Frank, Peggy Guggenheim, and Cleopatra. She is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at Bard. This week I e-mailed her with a few questions about Orange’s work, Henry James, and her new memoir, 1974.

Sam Needleman: What drew you to the novels of Tommy Orange?

Francine Prose: Oddly, or not so oddly, the last essay I wrote for the Review was about Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar, who, it turns out, is Tommy Orange’s friend. Apparently they exchange sections of their works in progress. I can understand why they might feel like kindred spirits: two young writers who have lively and original voices and who come from marginalized communities. (Akbar is Iranian-American, Orange an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.) Both manage in their fiction to be at once deeply serious and entertaining. Both address the difficulty of finding a coherent sense of self in a society that makes that search ever harder and that helpfully suggests addiction as an easy solution. Both employ a wide range of convincing narrative voices; both can move from moments of great tenderness to scenes of horrifying violence. Both tell us things we didn’t know and alter our sense of the world.

In your review you quote Orange’s character Edwin Black, who claims that “the problem with Indigenous art is that it’s stuck in the past. The catch, or the double bind, about the whole thing is: If it isn’t pulling from tradition, how is it Indigenous? And if it is stuck in tradition, in the past, how can it be relevant to other Indigenous people living now, how can it be modern?” How does Orange begin to answer these questions?

Like many of Orange’s characters, the isolated, chronically constipated, computer-addicted Edwin Black is concerned with matters of authenticity: how to feel like part of a community, how to honor and restore traditions that have been distorted and erased by the dominant culture, how to avoid being mired in history. What I wish for Edwin is that he could not only be in a Tommy Orange novel but read one. There There and Wandering Stars strike me as complex, inspired answers to the questions that torment Edwin. Orange’s portrayal of the Native community in Oakland, California, is nuanced, sharp, and contemporary. He examines, with sympathy and a bracing lack of sentimentality, the ways that traditions can be respected and reinvigorated, and how the present—without being “stuck in the past”—is informed by everything that preceded it.

A quiet outrage—at corruption, unfreedom, and injustice—simmers under much of your work, including your new memoir, 1974. What influences do you attribute this aspect of your writing to?

Somewhere, lost in one of my file cabinets, is a 1950s women’s magazine featuring a full-page ad for replacement windows guaranteed not to shatter in the event of a nuclear blast. I wish I knew where it was, because it is so emblematic of the atmosphere of my childhood and of the sources of what you call “quiet outrage.” I grew up during the cold war. I remember watching the Army–McCarthy hearings on TV. I had no idea what they were about, or what was at stake, but I recall being upset by McCarthy’s bullying and by the specter of Roy Cohn, hovering in the background like a goblin out of Bosch.

I’ve never forgotten how, during a family trip to Virginia, we stopped at a traffic light beside a Richmond city bus, and I noticed that all the Black people were sitting in the back. I was aware of politics long before anti–Vietnam War activism really turned up the heat. But I don’t think that “quiet outrage” greatly affected my work until the 1980s, when suddenly I was confronted on a daily basis with the brutal consequences—the precipitous rise in homelessness and income inequality—of trickle-down economics.

In 1974 you write about reading Henry James when you were starting out as a novelist and “thinking my job description was to watch and try to understand who people were, to intuit what they’d been through, what they revealed or tried to hide, what they said versus what they meant. The challenge was to find the right sentences, the right words, the right punctuation to get it down on the page.” Is that still your idea of what a novelist ought to do?

Yes. Part of a novelist’s job is to write about, or at least think about, what it means to be human. And questions of style—diction, word choice, punctuation—seem to me as essential as they ever did. Not long ago I was talking with some writer friends, and everyone agreed that our absolute happiest moments have occurred when we thought we needed ten words to describe something and then discovered a single word that would do the trick. I can’t speak for every author, but every writer I know and respect has spent hours dithering: Comma or no comma? Semicolon or period? 

What do you consider the major shortcomings of the contemporary English-language novel?

The contemporary novel is not only alive and well but healthier than ever: as brave, as accomplished, certainly more diverse. I have noticed, though, that the gap between so-called literary and so-called popular fiction has widened over time. I understand the desire to read for escape, but I’m puzzled by the current appetite for erotic fantasies about flying dragons and by domestic thrillers so thin they make the big juicy best sellers of the second half of the twentieth century seem like Balzac. Perhaps a few too many dystopian novels are being written. Obviously, there have been great ones: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America comes to mind. And there are good reasons why the genre proliferates. But I’ve begun to avoid it: I have too many of my own dark imaginings about the future to want to immerse myself in someone else’s.

In a 2012 essay on Marina Abramović you wrote that nowadays it is rare for a work of contemporary art “to inspire its viewers with anything approaching an extreme emotion”—and that Abramović, with The Artist is Present (2010), did just that. Do you open a novel in the hope of experiencing an extreme emotion?

There are books that have made me laugh (most recently, Jen Beagin’s Big Swiss) and cry. I’ve written about how I’m unable to read James Alan McPherson’s short story “Gold Coast” without weeping. Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 put me in a state of anxiety that persisted for quite a while after I’d finished reading it. But the extreme emotion I most often seek and experience is extreme admiration. How did this person find such a perfect metaphor and construct such a beautiful sentence? How did that writer do something that I never imagined could be done in fiction?