Wandering Stars was the selection for our book club this month. We previously read Tommy Orange’s first book, There There, before the pandemic, so we were generally eager to read this one. Some of those who missed reading the first book did so at this time. In my opinion, it is best to read the first one first, because the second one is both a prequel and a sequel to the first one. But the books can stand alone as well.
Wandering Stars starts off with the Sand Creek Massacre, continues with the forced education of Native children (“kill the Indian to save the man”, and eventually the migration to Oakland - thus filling in the four or so generations before the characters in There There. This section is the first third of the book. It ends with the childhoods of Opal and Jackie - the grandmothers in the first book.
The second two thirds follows the lives of the three brothers - Orvil, Loother, and Lony - after the mass shooting at the Pow Wow that ends the first book.
Orvil was gravely wounded, but survived, albeit traumatized and now addicted to painkillers. Loother seems to have the most intact psyche, but he has largely withdrawn from the family. Lony is turning into a mystic, and has started cutting himself.
We also continue with Jacquie, who has miraculously managed to stay sober for an extended period. Opal, who continues to hold the family together, has been diagnosed with the cancer that killed her mother, and has less bandwidth to monitor and care for the boys.
I won’t spoil the rest of the plot, but the fates of all of these characters hang in the balance throughout the book, as does that of Sean, a mixed-race adopted boy who becomes the friend - and drug source - of Orvil. (Sean has his own trauma: his mother died horribly of an early-onset dementia, his dad is a professional drug dealer after losing his pharmacist job, and his older brother looks down on him for not being “blood.”)
Tommy Orange’s writing is excellent. In particular, his writing about addiction is so very real and nuanced. I am not sure if Orange himself struggled with addiction, but he has said that it runs in his family. He avoids simplistic and simple answers, and neither excuses nor condemns. Likewise for the effects of trauma - there is always more going on than a simple “man up” or victimhood. Things are complicated.
The title of the book comes from, of all places, the book of Jude, in the New Testament. It’s a rather weird book, full of references to angels fucking human women - those “wandering stars.” The earliest ancestor in the book names himself Jude after this book, finding in the language something too “foreign” to be truly a part of the white man’s religion that has been forced on him.
A theme that runs through the book is that of running away. Jude runs away from the massacre, Charles runs away from a Native ceremony that goes awry, Victoria flees to Oakland first, then from her employers who want her unborn child, Jacquie buries her pain in alcohol, Jamie does the same and dies of her addiction, Loother hides in his love for his girlfriend, Lony in his mysticism and eventual flight from the family altogether, Orvil runs to drugs. And on it goes, down the generations.
The book is not without hope, though - through it all, for the most part, the characters find their way and their identities. And the relics of the past are rediscovered and tie the family together in its own way.
There are some fascinating lines in the book, insights into the experience of being human, and being a marginalized human. The first one is this one, in the last episode of the first part, regarding Victoria Bear Shield, who will become the mother of Opal and Jacquie. Her early experiences with men are, like that of so many women, appalling. Victoria fights back, though.
Find ways to get back at them. Leak the air from their tires, call them in the middle of the night whispering sour nothings, let their dogs out of their yards, drop frozen fish in the open windows of their cars, call out their names on the street then hide; these men who hurt you, who wrong you, who hit you, make them miserable in every way you can. Some would call it spite, for women it will be called spite and being vindictive; while injured men receive their justice and pass out their vengeance, women will be called petty and catty, won’t get to feel the honor a word like revenge endows upon men.
This is quite the statement. Women are indeed denied the dignity of “revenge” the way men allowed to experience. I am reminded of Nesrine Malik’s observation that white Americans love to look down on the Islamic world because of “honor killings,” completely oblivious to the fact that we in the West have our honor killings just as often - women are primarily killed by male intimate partners. Men are admired in a way, for asserting dominance and punishing women for getting out of line. But women are just catty when they do the same. Or even just fight back.
Corresponding to this is a passage where Sean, who (surprise!) turns out to be gay or bisexual and non-binary (the book is a bit unclear in the epilogue), rejects the masculinity of his older brother.
Sometimes it felt like he just wished he did not have to belong to the group of men that made him a part of what Mike was all about. That square-jawed American brutishness, that surly dickishness. Sean had always felt uncomfortable being referred to as a boy, or as a young man. But, and he knew this was the biggest but, feeling nonbinary did not mean he wasn’t a man who directly benefited from being a man. Men were a secret cult. To be a boy being groomed to be a man was to be joining a secret cult against women, and against anything not squarely a man - square-jawed shape into the square-jawed hole. Not every single boy. Not every single man. Not Sean. He didn’t think. But he knew he was a part of it, and could not fully recuse himself from participation in all that it included.
As a cishet white man, I definitely feel this. I am not much of a “masculine” sort in the way described. I’m a proud Beta, I like cooking and violin and flowers and poetry and ambling in the wilderness and being with my kids, and a bunch of other stuff that doesn’t code as “masculine” these days - although it did so more in the Victorian Era, ironically.
But I can’t really opt out of the privilege I have. The most I can do is to treat women well, and use what influence I have to make the world better for everyone.
If Sean wants to opt out of masculinity, Loother wants to opt out of society. This description is fascinating.
Loother hates that he sees other kids all see-through like the sandwich baggies Jacquie packs those no-crust neat little triangle sandwiches in for their lunches, and that they see it too, that everyone seems to be so aware of it all being so see-through and painful and funny and embarrassing, most of all embarrassing, having to be in school together and paying attention or not paying attention to fashion trends, being active online and liking and following each other there or not, but then also how everyone acts like they’re all not doing it all so see-through, that gets Loother the most, how everyone acts like they’re not feeling too much, and at the same time trying to act like they’re too cool to feel anything.
God, I’m glad I never have to repeat high school or especially jr. high. Good god no.
I’ll end with the last bit of the book, where Lony writes a letter to the family after years of absence. He expresses what I have been feeling about my parents’ generation for years - the way they have plundered our future, and then blamed my kids’ generation for it.
I’ve known what this world’s about. I been running into it. We young ones do. We who hate that we still believe something good could come of it. We the young ones have always suffered, inherited, had to know what it means to be left behind and left with shit and left with weight and left without you or any form of help or helpful policy to bridge what’s between the abyss and anything even resembling justice and equality.
If only the young survive the selfishness of this dying world, of old whites who always thought they owned the earth, to use and expend whatever they can grasp with their cold dead hands, who’ve always let this country down its hole, to its inevitable collapse. We who inherit the mess, this loss, this deficit, this is my prayer, for forgiveness, we the inheritors of a world abandoned. May we learn to forgive ourselves, so that we lose the weight, so that we might fly, not as birds but as people, get above the weight and carry on, for the next generations, so that we might keep living, stop doing all this dying.
I have had some older relatives of mine react with fury when I have suggested that once my parents’ generation dies off, there will be a lot more hope that we can actually address the serious issues that face humanity: climate change, growing inequality, dropping life expectancies, low birth rates, and the other burdens they chose to place on the young people. Rather than spend our time (as we do now) on endless culture wars and hatred of white middle class Boomers toward anyone different from them.
Now that both books are out, they can be read together, as perhaps the first two installments in Orange’s family saga. It will be interesting to see what he writes next.
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