Novel ‘Wandering Stars’ is a fiery followup to Pulitzer finalist ‘There There’

Tommy Orange’s fiery debut novel, “There There,” ended with several bangs (quite literally) and left us wondering if there might be a return, in a sequel, to its most memorable characters, among them half-sisters Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and Jacquie Red Feather.

Six years later, “Wandering Stars” is exactly that sequel, just as damning and brilliantly incensed as Orange’s debut, but also much more. It’s a prequel, too, rounding out the history of trauma and addiction in the lineage of a mostly Cheyenne family from as far back as the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre to our pandemic times.

With stories strung together loosely — some of them like long, fevered dreams, others like flashes of consciousness — “Wandering Stars” presents as two books. The first half streams forth with the slow burn of colonial violence, evangelism and erasure; the second half is driven by that trauma’s devastating effects on a younger, multiracial generation living in Oakland, California.

It all begins in Colorado when Jude Star escapes from the massacre, during which “seven hundred drunken men came at dawn with cannons” and killed many women and children. On the run with a horse and stray dog, he recalls that “[e]verything that had been before what happened at Sand Creek went back inside the earth, deep into that singular stillness of land and death.”

Ahead of him is the bleakest trail — near-starvation, then confinement in a Floridian “prison-castle” with real-life jailer Richard Henry Pratt, then descent into alcoholism. He eventually marries a religious Irish woman named Hannah Star.

While Jude’s recollections are distinct and whole (“I remembered another story … of how our people came from the stars”), his son Charles Star’s are scattered and fraught, especially after dehumanizing years at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. His memories are “a broken mirror through which he only ever sees himself in pieces.” Ever present in the novel is the idea that something or someone is being disappeared, is on the verge of vanishing.

Charles, also an addict, will fall in love with a childhood friend, Opal Bear Shield, and then commit a crime for which he pays dearly, leaving behind Opal, pregnant and on the run. She, too, disappears, experiencing a strange, haunting death. But her baby, Victoria Opal Shield, survives to bear those unforgettable “There There” half-sisters, Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield and Jacquie Red Feather.

Readers of “There There” might also recall Jacquie’s grandsons, Loother, Lony and Orvil, the last of whom gets shot at an Oakland pow wow. Orvil’s rippling story of recovery, addiction and existential crisis anchors the rest of “Wandering Stars.”

All in all, Orange, an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, has turned up the dial on his characters. His confession-style approach — heavy on words and memories tumbling out, and on rambling sentences — plunges us deep into his characters’ interiority: “Part of me was being permanently erased or replaced with gray gray gray gray, grayness.”

It makes for slower reading. It also is exhausting, but so are the sad, seemingly immaterial lives of Orange’s characters, all of whom are trying to make sense of — and move on from — what the world has so cruelly bequeathed them.

Angela Ajayi is a Minneapolis-based writer and critic.

Wandering Stars

By: Tommy Orange.

Publisher: Knopf, 336 pages, $29.

Event: 6:30 p.m. March 19, Minneapolis Central Library (sold out, but register for Zoom log-in at birchbarkbooks.com). Free.