Watching TV and Reading Two New Books with a Sense of Place

What I watched this week

Biden made Speaker Johnson squirm!

Photos from the New York Times

Reading

I’ve been reading two very recently published books by two authors I like: Tommy Orange and Tana French. While the two books are very different in most respects, I have been struck by how each of them is permeated by a sense of place and by a community in this place. The Native American community in Oakland, California is the focus for Tommy Orange. A rural hamlet in the wilds of Ireland is the focus for Tana French. Both authors have written about these communities in previous books as well, and I looked forward to reading these sequels. Although each book is about much more than one topic, I’ve concentrated on the sense of place in each one.

The Hunter by Tana French

Tana French: The Hunter 
(published March 5, 2024)

This is a huge book with lots of rambling descriptions of the small community of Ardnakelty in a backwoods area in County Mayo, Ireland. As a reader, you either have to be very patient or very tolerant of long descriptive passages to enjoy these colorful passages for themselves alone, rather than as prologue to any suspense that the author might decide to build. You have to enjoy the slow portrayal of a bunch of individualists with a huge back story and relationships and rivalries going back to their school days and even to their grandparents. You have to enjoy finding out which ones know and tell all the gossip and which ones can keep it to themselves. You have to empathize with the Irish people who find a dry summer heatwave unfamiliar and agonizing: and it lasts until almost the final chapter of the book.

In this mix is Cal, a stranger, a former Chicago policeman, who has lived in the town for two years and was featured along with the rest of them in the earlier novel, The Searcher. And the central character is Trey, who is fifteen and trying to control her chaotic environment.

While one expects a Tana French novel to be some sort of murder mystery, no murder happens until halfway through: it’s all personalities and an emerging story of a possible con by a recently-returned native son and how he winds up the locals who have never left. As one of the characters says: “I’ve been local all my life.” (p. 244) They know each other well: another character explains, when asked to identify the accent of some unknown men: “Ardnakelty. Even just over the other side of the mountain, or across the river, they talk different. These were from round here.” (p. 302) And when there’s finally a murder and a detective he turns out to be a Dubliner — and you should hear what they say about Dubliners.

The main characters’ faithful dogs have a major role in depicting life in rural Ardnakelty.
I found these photos of some of the famous Irish dog breeds, though the dogs in the story are mutts.

Two dogs show up on the first page, and accompany their two masters, the local girl Trey and the American ex-pat Cal, throughout the book. Dogs are an integral part of community life in Ardnakelty. Just about every important character in the book also has at least one dog, and the dogs relate to one another in a kind of mirror to their people. Right from the start we learn about Trey and Cal’s two dogs:

 

“Her dog Banjo lollops in wide circles off the path, snuffing and burrowing among the thick heather, which is too brown-edged and heavily scented for July. … Every few minutes he comes bounding back to tell Trey, with small happy puffs and moans, what he’s found. Banjo is a mutt, black and tan, with a beagle’s head and body set on the legs of something stubbier, and he’s a lot more talkative than Trey is. He got his name from a banjo-shaped patch of white on his belly. … Cal Hooper, the American who lives down near the village, has Banjo’s litter-mate and named him Rip, and if a plain name is good enough for Cal’s dog, it’s good enough for Trey’s. Besides, she spends much of her waking time at Cal’s place, meaning the two dogs spend much of their time together, and it would sound stupid if they didn’t match.” (p. 1)

Trey — in her relationship to Banjo and to Cal and with the rest of the characters — is a perplexing teenage mystery to those around her, especially Cal and Lena, a local woman who is Cal’s romantic partner. They constantly — maybe repetitively — react to her combination of insight and immaturity:

“He can’t be sure, any more, what she’s capable of. When he thought she had none of the artifice other teenagers develop, he was wrong again. She’s just been saving it, and tailoring it, for when it matters.” (p. 313)

“Lena spent the whole drive looking for the right way to go about this, but all she found was the looming, intractable sense that she’s out of her depth. Someone else should be doing this, Noreen or Cal or someone who has a bull’s notion of how to deal with teenagers; anyone but her.” (p. 406)

While I enjoyed the local color, the relationships among the characters, and the build-up of events, ultimately I found The Hunter to be disappointing. All in all, it was too rambling and too long. While it didn’t exactly lack focus, it also didn’t exactly stay focused either. For much of the novel, the plot centers on two men who intend to trick a number of local people out of a lot of money through a get-rich-quick scheme, but then this con falls apart, and the focus changes. Much of the plot depends on knowing the ending of the previous novel, and the main revelation (which I can’t say because it would be a spoiler) is in my view kind of a let-down. The novel, in my interpretation, turns out  not to be a police procedural or a detective story at all: more of a social history. As the New York Times reviewer says: “The secretive village is a trope as old as mysteries — as old as humanity itself.” (link)

Ireland is always a focus for American celebration,
especially Saint Patrick’s Day which is coming up soon.
My neighbors already have their holiday banner up.

 Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

“Walking around Lake Merritt you see all kinds of people in Oakland, the hipster, the homeless, the homeless hipster, the mixtape mixed-race CD-pushing rapper, the serious runners and the casual runners, the joggers, the stoners, the casual blunt smokers, the power walkers, the slow walkers that talk endlessly, the stroller pushers, and then just so many young people with blankets on the grass. It didn’t used to be like this around the lake, people always walked it, but now it is a kind of scene, with food trucks in tow.” (Wandering Stars, p. 184)

Tommy Orange’s new book has much more history than his earlier book There, There. In the early chapters it goes back much further to the lives of the Native American ancestors of the modern residents of Oakland who were in There, There. These predecessors were above all survivors, who managed to dodge the official efforts to exterminate the Indians, and who evaded annihilation in a variety of determined ways. In Tommy Orange’s view: “all Indians alive past the year 1900 are kinds of miracles.” (p. 102)

Tommy Orange: Wandering Stars 
(published February 27, 2024)

Oakland became the home of Native Americans who were victims of the vicious Indian schools that deprived children of their heritage in the early twentieth century — including the ancestors of the main character of the book: a teenage boy who is being raised by his two grandmothers, Opal and Jacquie (as they are viewed by Native Americans; actually they are sisters and one is literally his grandmother). Oakland played a role in the way Opal thought about meeting his grandfather. In her mind, she relives this:

“You will think he is white or part white but he will recognize you as Indian and ask where you’re from. The question will throw you at first, because you’re from Oakland, so you want to say you’re from here, but you don’t know what here means for a moment, did it mean modern times, did it mean Oakland, did it mean America? And where would you be from if you were a real Indian? Oklahoma? You will know that’s not true, that Indians were from every single corner of the country—beyond the country. You will have read about hundreds of tribes, each with their own languages and customs and creation stories.” (p. 113)

As the reviewer in the Washington Post expressed it: “As ‘Wandering Stars’ sweeps through the decades, Orange gathers up moments of love and despair in stories that demonstrate what a piercing writer he is. But then, about halfway through the novel, we arrive in 2018, more than 150 years after the Sand Creek massacre. Here, Orange flares his wings and touches down for good in the home of Orvil Red Feather, the teenager wounded at the climax of ‘There There.’” (link)

 Now Oakland is the center of life in the novel, and appears in many of their thoughts. For an adopted dark-skinned child of rich parents, who befriends Orvil:

“Anyone’s skin color in a place like Oakland, that could be okay, that could be nothing to mention, normal even, but Oakland had a lotta sides to it. And it had these hills, these Oakland hills, as they were called in code, meaning not the flatlands, meaning not the east, meaning there was money up there, real estate value, multimillion-dollar views of Oakland.”

For Orvil, aware of being a child of several generations of Oakland Native Americans, the local neighborhoods in the poorer part of town were critical:

“The neighborhood is not that deep into East Oakland, but not near Lake Merritt either, a kind of central East Oakland sometimes called the middle extent, because most of Oakland is East Oakland, but to tell anyone where they live in Oakland, if asked, they might just say they live in the Dimond.” (p. 157)

Opal and Jacquie, the grandmothers, have many memories; for example a conversation about the Mormon temple in Oakland:

“You remember Mom used to tell us the Mormon temple was Disneyland?” 

“She told us a lot we knew not to believe,” 

Opal says. “You didn’t believe her?” 

Jacquie says. “I did. Enough that I looked it up later. You know Walt Disney got his inspiration from Fairyland way back when? And Frank Oz, who was one of the other main Muppet guys, he came out of Fairyland too? All that magic in the world, that came from Oakland.” (p. 187) 

The main character, the young boy Orvil, has a lot of promise. The two grandmothers have high aspirations for him. But circumstances lead him to become addicted first to painkillers and then to worse. It’s sad, but at the end. he describes his painful path to recovery, creating his identity, and eventually can go back to Oakland. 

“I was all about being from Oakland and being Native and feeling like I belonged to something older than the country. Opal never talked about the people who first lived in Oakland. And I hadn’t thought to look it up.” (p. 296)

Update March 16: For a really comprehensive review and interview with the author see the Guardian article titled “Tommy Orange: ‘My whole family has has problems with addiction, including myself.’”

 

Reviews © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Dogs dedicated to Eileen’s critter post.