It’s meant a lot of different things over the years. The novel explores what it means to be Native American today. I was using that as a parallel to Native experience and the “there there” of the land before it was colonised, developed over and bordered. In Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, she talks about how someone was asking her what it’s like to come back to her childhood home in Oakland, where I also come from, and she says, “There is no there there.” She was talking about how it had been developed over and was unrecognisable. The title is taken from a Gertrude Stein quote: “There is no there there.” What’s the significance of that quote? I didn’t want to go anywhere near the old romanticised view of the Indian as the warrior, the powerful, the unflinching, the brave. I wanted the characters to be working-class, because so often the characters in novels that I’ve read are white and upper-middle-class with white, upper-middle-class problems. You can just look at the health statistics and they’re pretty staggering. I wanted to write characters that felt true and real, and there’s a lot of harrowing detail about the lives of Native people. Many of your characters are deeply troubled. If we all have to be historical, with a headdress, looking off into the distance, that’s hopeless as far as building a proper, complex, human identity. Writing a polyphonic, multigenerational novel is resisting this one idea of what being Native is supposed to look like. There’s a monolithic version of what a Native is supposed to be.

It gives it a kind of propulsion and makes it a really active reading experience.ĭid you also want to portray as many different Native urban experiences as you could? And when the reader gets the connection, something really special happens: like a clicking in place.

I like, within a novel, to jump around and see how the different voices connect. I really liked what a chorus of voices could do. What made you decide to have 12 narrators?

Orange tommy there there