Such a synopsis might suggest a standard folk horror tale, but Bernstein subverts the tropes of the genre to resist such simplicity, and in doing so offers a far more conflicted view of victimhood. The style is typified by her handling of the narrator’s voice. Ambiguity is a key facet of the folk horror genre, with unreliable narrators often used as plot devices or twisty gimmicks. However, the unreliability of the narrator in Study for Obedience is more nuanced and enlightening. Because it’s not that we doubt the essential truth of her status and circumstances within the novel—hers is not a project of deception—rather the tone of her recollections suggests a level of embellishment. As though, finally granted the opportunity to tell her story, the urge to exaggerate proves overwhelming. Out of a desire to better capture a wider truth perhaps, or merely a sign of an author getting carried away in the joy of the telling.

The question at the heart of Study for Obedience therefore becomes not so much whether we can believe what the narrator is telling us, rather what it says of her as a character that she tells her story in such a manner. Because again, on the surface, she might appear a familiar figure. Her relationship with her brother is exploitative. She serves as his housekeeper and personal assistant, learning the particular demands of his routine so as to provide a seamless service which extends to reading to him in the bath and even washing him. An age-old power dynamic is suggested. Masculine dominance subjugating the female. But just as the plot subverts expectation, so too does Bernstein refuse us the comfort straightforward relationships. Because though the historical systems of oppression are clearly present, she allows her characters to bend the logic of their outcomes. Like the certain delight the narrator takes in what appear to be demeaning tasks. As she admits at one point, “I did like to dress him.”

The youngest of many siblings, the narrator has existed within a state of servitude to her siblings since before she could speak. “I attended to their every desire,” she states in the opening, “smoothed away the slightest discomfort with perfect obedience, with the highest degree of devotion, so that over time their desires became mine.” This sense of exchange is important to the novel, and slowly revealed to be bidirectional. For the narrator comes to realise that just as the desires of the oppressor are imprinted on the oppressed, so too does the suffering of the exploited worm its way into the oppressor. A strange transfer which upends power dynamics as we know them, and allows the persecuted a more ambivalent image.

The idea is encapsulated by the Paula Rego quote which serves as an epigraph to the novel. “I can turn the tables and do as I want. I can make women stronger. I can make them obedient and murderous at the same time.” This duality dawns upon the narrator and she embraces the contradiction. The subservient actions she performs for her brother—dressing and bathing and brushing him—come to feel almost like weapons she wields over him. Her epiphany is that the victim is more complicated than we might realise. That they can have strange agencies, even power, within even the worst treatment.

The opposite proves true of the narrator’s brother. A man who had “always despised weaklings, detested victims, found self-pity, personal grief and collective mourning abhorrent,” he represents the antithesis of narrator, not only disliking weakness but finding himself drawn to cruelty in its presence. “If he himself had to choose between resentment and self-pity, he would choose the former any day, any day,” as the narrator states. To see weakness in another is to be reminded of his own, to be dragged at some subconscious level towards the belittled state of victimhood, so better to hate it, lash out in disgust. But this proves his undoing, because violence begets suffering, meaning a vicious circle emerges. Weakness provokes cruelty, cruelty causes weakness, and so the wheel turns.

The brother’s gradual deterioration across the second half of the novel is symbolic of this phenomenon. The idea exploitation is a mutually destructive force. That the powerful will be infected by a rot regardless of how much they stand to gain from the relationship. To enter such a bargain, to force another to be obedient for your benefit, is to destroy yourself slowly, invoke a curse that cannot be broken. Violence will always bend back upon itself to decimate the hand which holds the whip. Just as the narrator’s obedience becomes its own clandestine form of agency, so too does the brother’s dominance transmogrify into a curious form of subjugation. As if, in providing every demanded service and luxury, she helps him inadvertently dismantle himself, piece by bloody piece.

The gendered reading of this sibling relationship is obvious, and against the backdrop of a wary townsfolk it becomes an allegory for xenophobic distrust too. But as the narrator’s background reveals itself in small flashes, the meaning extends to history. For she belongs to “an obscure though reviled people who had been dogged across borders and put into pits,” and her new home is revealed to be the site of this persecution. The spectre of the Holocaust haunts the novel, a ghostly echo within every interaction, a shadow puppet on the far wall. The ultimate form of taming is to eradicate, but any power attempting genocide, that is attempting to create an absence, is doomed to internalise this absence and be consumed from within.

Appearing to understand this on some level, the narrator embraces this destructive potential and fear it instils. Several scenes see her enter public spaces despite the clear hostility towards her, and she even takes to fashioning strange effigies to leave around the town as though to further provoke suspicion. The animosity she faces becomes its own form of validation, and she positions her ostracized status as a kind of social necessity. “I sensed dimly the outline of complex networks of exchange and relation that structured the society one lived in,” she explains, “structures that in certain cases required the presence, or more appropriately the exclusion, of a particular individual or object, to enable the cohesion of the whole. One played one’s part, everyone did.”

Thus, Bernstein’s protagonist settles as neither a victim or bogeyman, but instead in the murky middle ground. The central achievement of a novel where the subjective nature of the narrator’s voice, be it unreliability or embellishment, forces the reader to question the apparently objective image of victimhood so often put forward. Why must we demand our victims be innocent, and what does it say of us? Can the dominant order of the world be challenged from within? “Did it follow, then, that I had achieved some measure of grace after all?” as the narrator ponders:

That, after all this time, and completely unbeknownst to myself, I had passed into the role of a teacher, a kind of spiritual guide, who own motions of the spirit were so powerful as to be able to influence the thought and action of others? No, no, surely not […] Nothing could have induced me to take on a leadership role of any kind, I was a faithful and perennial servant, and yet, and no one could have found the situation more impossible that I did, it seemed to me that my obedience had itself taken on a kind of mysterious power. And if I had been granted this power, by some grace, against my wishes, must I not then make use of it in some way?

Study For Obedience is out now via Granta Books.

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Rooted in the futility of existence at the end of civilisation, The Doloriad is brave enough to mostly forgo plot in favour of atmosphere, the vibe shifting from unbearably oppressive to almost dream-like. But there is a story to follow. One centring on Dolores, one of the younger offspring, legless and pale and grublike, who is sent away as a marriage offering to a mysterious group of others who may be real, delusion or lie. When Dolores unexpectedly returns alone, the Matriarch’s grip on the community begins to loosen and what little order existed dissolves.

But it is Williams’s intricate prose which stands apart, and the resulting heavy, listless atmosphere which settles over everything. A tone warm, fetid and claustrophobic, embodied by scenes in the makeshift schoolroom where both pupils and teacher drift off to sleep during the latter’s rambling sermons. Even moments of extreme violence elicit little response from this broken family, as if nature’s unthinking cruelty has begun to sprout in their souls in the same manner plants and fungi have reclaimed what were once buildings parcelled off for human existence.

Odd, shocking, sometimes surreal (wait for the sitcom segments) and often beautiful despite itself, The Doloriad is a much needed poisonous antidote to the identikit khaki and rubble of most post-apocalyptic fiction. You won’t find any simple moral arcs here, no Hail Mary hopes of salvation. For Williams’s vision of the end times paints the remaining people as maggots writhing around in the rotten remains of our world.

The Doloriad is out now via Dead Ink Books (UK), and will be released next month in the US via MCD x FSG Originals.

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In his latest novel, Pure Life, Eugene Marten takes us beyond Jelonnek’s tape into the life of Number Nineteen himself. First with an extended prologue which condenses the slow rise and swift fall of an athlete on the cusp of glory into less than fifty pages, then through the aftermath that now represents his life. Like a veteran returned home with no way to communicate what has been taken from him, Nineteen is a man crippled—physically, mentally, spiritually—by the very thing which gave him purpose, losing his fame and family with equally undignified haste. His too-often battered head loses chunks of time to blackness, yet is somehow entirely submerged in the past. As though there exists a threshold inside of a man, be it of triumph, pain or brotherhood, beyond which there are only degrees of mourning.

Alarmed by his deteriorating health, Nineteen heads to the Mosquito Coast of Honduras for non-FDA-approved treatment, a Hail Mary throw which might make him whole again. But as with so many promised miracles, there’s no substance behind the dream, just an empty vacuum which quickly sucks Nineteen toward the brutal truths of existence. There is no rewinding now.

What follows is a journey into the rainforest to rival Heart of Darkness or Paul Bowles’s ‘Distant Episode’, a nightmare told from a curdled concoction of colonialism, capitalism and masculinity that readers familiar with Marten’s work will have been half-expecting all along. But as with his previous novels, Marten is too astute to let any sense of commentary overshadow the immediacy of the writing, foregoing easy moralising in favour rhythm and feel. The essence of Pure Life lies within this reptilian drive of the prose. Because for better or worse, the journey allows Nineteen to rediscover what it means to feel alive in the purest sense. Pure life is the athlete in motion, is violence, is the heat and noise of the jungle itself.

Pure Life is out now via Strange Light.

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Enter one of academia’s favourite buzzwords. The rhizome. Unlike the dichotomous model of trees, rhizomatic plants and fungus grow in all directions with no central point. “A rhizome as subterranean stem is absolutely different from roots and radicles,” Deleuze and Guattari explained. An interlinked structure without a central beginning or end. “Any point of a rhizome can be connected to anything other, and must be. This is very different from the tree or root, which plots a point, fixes an order.”

Jeff Chon’s debut novel, Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun, applies the rhizomatic model to our conspiratorial age. The narrative takes inspiration from the Comet Ping Pong incident, where a man drove from North Carolina to Washington D.C. armed with a semi-automatic rifle to attack a supposed Democratic Party child-sex ring operating from the basement of a pizzeria, though Chon adds further layers of complexity and irony to delve into the guts of such events. His protagonist Scott Bonneville walks into the Pizza Galley Family Fun Center and foils a would-be shooter—the titular Good Guy With a Gun—but he hadn’t arrived in search of the perfect slice. Bonneville was at the restaurant to carry out his own attack, motivated by a web of conspiracy theories and urban legends which, fertilised by our good friend toxic masculinity, manifest as a violent delusion both highly personal and strangely familiar.

Because in his own mind, Bonneville isn’t a conspiracy theorist. The moon landings certainly occurred, Earth’s roundness is not up for debate. You don’t have to be a card-carrying wacko to care about kids being exploited or kidnapped across the country. A little bit of your own research unveils clear links to law enforcement, schools and religious groups. Is it so wild to care about suffering kids? Then there is shady stuff involving Wall Street and the Carlyle Group, and the Bushes and Clintons, and the CIA and J.D. Salinger and Lee Harvey Oswald and Adrenochrome and and and…

“Conspiracy… is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age,” wrote Frederic Jameson. “A degraded figure of the total logic of late capital,” or, what he describes elsewhere “a degraded attempt […] to think the impossible totality of the contemporary world system.” But rather than representing a simplified fairy-tale version of global systems, the contemporary culture of conspiracy theory has morphed into its own impossible totality. In attempting to explain or reject the endless web of information, conspiracy theories come to represent a perfect example of the form. A rhizomatic structure key to their longevity and persistence. When the Pizzagate shooter pleaded guilty to assault with a dangerous weapon, Infowars‘ Alex Jones issued a statement acknowledging Comet Ping Pong was not involved in human trafficking. But the Democrat sex ring story was not demolished by the affirmation. Rather the Pizzagate conspiracy mutated to encompass the new developments, and now looks quaint compared with the scope and influence of QAnon. Take an axe to the trunk of a tree and every branch will wither and die. But sever a fungal rhizome and no such catastrophe occurs. The damage remains entirely local, the wider network no less capable of growth. “A rhizome may be broken, shattered at a given spot,” wrote Deleuze and Guattari, “but it will start up again on one of its old lines, or on new lines. You can never get rid of ants because they form an animal rhizome that can rebound time and again after most of it has been destroyed.”

Chon brings this concept to life stylistically, circling the incident at the restaurant and providing glimpses into every occurrence and character which played some role in it, no matter how tangential. Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun comes to represent its own interlinked structure. The narrative is not linear. There is no present per se, just a series of scenes before, during and after the precipitating event. Vignettes presented out of order, and themselves prone to flashing back to some previous scene or revealing an as yet unrealised future. A story, for all of its male vanity and violent fervour, with no final villain or point of blame.

“You may make a rupture, draw a line of flight, yet there is still a danger that you will reencounter organizations that restratify everything.” Deleuze and Guattari could have been writing about Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun here. “Formations that restore power to a signifier, attributions that reconstitute a subject—anything you like, from Oedipal resurgences to fascist concretions.” And seeing as they, like Chon, were writing about this horrible world we have created, in a funny way they were.

Hashtag Good Guy With a Gun is out now via Sagging Meniscus Press. Get it from your local indie bookshop, or failing that Bookshop.org.

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What follows is an odd and haunting novel which holds its intentions close to its chest. With its grey skies and thick mud, the prose is rooted in the Irish land, but this realism is challenged by both the cryptic narrative and the half-deranged characters at its heart. The short chapters accentuate this sense, acting like jump cuts between scenes and lending the feel of a dream. The result is peculiar but stronger for it, addressing the concerns of twenty-first century rural living but evoking a far older relationship to the land and the people who work it. So though Dennis’s style slots in alongside contemporary works like Cynan Jones’s The Dig or Evie Wyld’s All the Birds, Singing, it does so while maintaining an unsettling strangeness that is entirely its own.

The Beasts They Turned Away is out via Epoque Press.

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Bestiary is out now via Harvill Secker (UK) and Oneworld (US). Buy it from your local independent bookshop or Bookshop.org.

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Welfare, the debut novel from Steve Anwyll and one of the most recent in an ongoing hot streak from Tyrant Books, is a coming-of-age tale for the Age of Ennui. The premise is simple and captured neatly in the title. Our narrator is Stan (presumably a stand-in for Steve), who at sixteen finally decides he can’t cope with his home life any longer (his stepmother is awful and his Dad lives in a disinterested daze). Unfortunately, as with most teenage dreams of freedom, things don’t exactly turn out as he imagines.

Stan moves in with his older but not wiser buddy Greg, and begins a life of drink and dope and smoke after smoke after smoke. His succession of apartments start bad and go downhill, soon buried under rotting drifts of takeout trays and cigarette butts, whole rooms abandoned to avalanches of trash and useless belongings. From there the story rotates around Stan’s central plight, mired in a situation that has no visible end.

The supporting cast are little better off, facilitating similarly bleak and squalid lifestyles by other means, crappy jobs or Catholic aid. There’s a furiously angry landlord (“dressed like an out-of-state work cowboy”), a naive old super, and metal-head neighbours with a violent streak. “The kind of guys that say they’re Satanists,” Stan describes of the latter, “but only in regards to a lifetime of long greasy hair. Death metal. Pentagram tattoos. And getting fucked up.” However, perhaps most striking peripheral characters are the hordes of self-righteous passersby who never miss an opportunity to kick a teenage boy when he’s down. Every sweaty trudge to the welfare office is accompanied by car horns and yelled insults, adding literal insult to the injury of lonely waiting rooms and soul-crushing questionnaires.

Anwyll’s prose is broken into short staccato paragraphs, which lends the whole thing a kind of anxious rhythm. Each shard of text deepens Stan’s sense of directionless despair, each hopeful line revealed to be a false dawn before the end of the following paragraph. It’s also littered with typos and spelling mistakes, not because the narrator doesn’t know any better but because he doesn’t have the energy to do anything about it, the kind of shambling sloppiness that is ingrained in everything Stan does. He comes to represent an entire generation of kids trapped within a contemporary joke, life like those gag birthday candles that refuse to stay extinguished no matter how hard you blow. There comes a point when you begin to wonder why you ever wasted your breath.

Welfare is out now on Tyrant Books.

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The multi-generational narrative focuses on the De Vera family, who are introduced through Paz. Rising from abject poverty in rural Philippines, she becomes a nurse and falls in love with Dr Apolonio ‘Pol’ De Vera, the heartthrob surgeon whose family background is starkly more privileged than her own. Paz takes the leap and moves to the US, and when Pol follows they have a daughter, Roni. Eventually, joined by Pol’s niece, Hero, the true protagonist of the novel. Living in California undocumented, Hero is a former doctor fleeing both her hostile parents and her past with revolutionary guerillas of the National People’s Army, seeking to make a new home in America, or else forgot her old one in the Philippines.

The world in which Hero finds herself is brought to life in painstaking detail through all five senses, from the gamut of musical tastes and a veritable banquet of regional cuisine to the infamous Milpitas smell from the nearby landfill site. Language too plays an important role, with English, Tagalog, Pangasinan and Ilocano all used and often interchangeably, in doing so mapping the lines of class and culture that permeate the society. Language is determined by context—the who, what, where, when, why of the conversation—and itself forms a kind of secondary communication, a mode of interaction beyond words that speaks of history and social standing whether intended or otherwise.

This is complicated by the fact that every person has an unique relationship with each language. Hero cannot speak Pangasinan but is fluent in the others, while her friend Rosalyn grew up with Tagalog but lost it somewhere in her teens. Eight year-old Roni, having grown up in the US, seems unaware of any distinction, switching between English and Tagalog and Pangasinan within the same sentence, speaking in her own hybrid super-language that, to her at least, is as organic as any other. The phenomenon is indicative of the nuanced hand Castillo lends to her characters, each unique and self-standing, tied to their community yet distinct too, kinship never eradicating the distances created by individual circumstances.

In this way, Castillo refuses to flatten the intricacies of the immigrant experience into a neat trope, her characters not some collective sliver on the pie chart of human possibility but a cross section of the whole thing. There are doctors and nurses and faith healers, security guards and restaurateurs, make-up artists and DJs and pop stars. There are chaste prudes and promiscuous progressives, not to mention rich, haughty Catholics and superstitious mystics and people who practice both with equal fervour or disinterest.

So, Hero’s bisexuality and romance with another woman is not Castillo’s version of the rebellious-outlier-takes-on-cloistered-society. Some people react badly to the idea, some happily, some barely react at all. To a certain degree, this can be mapped over the social lines mentioned previously, though the alignment is not perfect. Because, ultimately, how each character acts and reacts transcends their history.

Elaine Castillo’s true triumph is that America Is Not the Heart cannot be faithfully categorized purely as an immigrant saga or LGBT romance. This, aside from being a testament to her writing, serves as a scathing critique of just what those labels entail, and what it says about the white gatekeepers who control them. Hero’s story does not conform to the ideal Western immigrant story of foreigner done well. She is not a plucky underdog making a home against homesickness and long odds, her history not present only to be beaten smooth of its sharp edges. Ultimately, she does not exist to follow the fanciful arc us straight white people like to imagine an immigrant or queer person traversing—the palatable, enriching passage from alienation to total acceptance, and thus, of course, a more realised state of being.

Because America Is Not the Heart is a novel about human experience, about loving and being loved, where every detail—the Filipinx-American setting, historical context, bisexual relationships, class hierarchies, family dramas—is used not to build the characters but the world around them, Great American conditions that must be navigated in order to live.

America Is Not the Heart is out now via Atlantic Books (UK) and Viking (US).

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In many ways, the novel shares a spirit with AM Homes’s This Book Will Save Your Life, though the differences are key. Homes’s protagonist Richard Novak is an affluent business man at the nadir of a conscious retreat from society, living an anaesthetised, hermetically-sealed existence within his luxury LA apartment. After what was either a brush with death or severe panic attack, Novak gradually re-emerges from his solitude, engaging in a series of bizarre and often New Age lifestyle choices as he integrates into a hyperreal Californian society. While Homes is witty and hilarious when commenting on all of this, it is conspicuous just how happy and fulfilled Novak becomes, as though for all of our ironic sniggering he is healed by the so-called banalities of self-help strategies.

Which brings us to Beagin’s protagonist, Mona. A house cleaner, Mona is at the other end of the social spectrum to Novak, though actively resists attempts and suggestions that she try to climb the ladder toward something more respectable. Which isn’t to say her sense of self-worth is robust. The beginning of the novel finds her volunteering at a needle exchange, where she soon meets an addict she knows only as Mr Disgusting and falls for him hard. “For the first time in years,” Beagin writes, “she felt beautiful, like a real prize.” Far from becoming a figure of humanity struggling within the grip of addiction, Disgusting is prone to long, unexplained absences, moonlighting as a pimp when he is present and treating Mona as something of a curiosity. Not only does he break his own alleged sobriety but also introduces Mona to heroin too, a situation which culminates in a casual moment of near-death, where he chooses to observe the result of an overdose rather than help.

The near-death experience is analogous to that of Homes’s Novak, and initiates a similar quest for meaning and self-discovery. Moving to Taos, New Mexico, with a brief detour to steal the miraculous dirt of El Santuario dear Chimayo, Mona starts her own cleaning business and gradually becomes acquainted with a variety of the local people. The role serves as a plot device, allowing Jen Beagin to set up a series of vignettes in which Mona’s idiosyncratic personality can clash with an assortment of weird and wonderful characters, both via direct contact and her constant sifting through the minutiae of their lives when cleaning.

These include, but are not limited to a New Age couple, Yoko and Yoko, who have never heard of David Lynch or Dennis Hopper yet watch the sunset every evening, a psychic named Betty who is in fact so psychic she thinks Mona is called Maura and the mysterious Henry, who is certainly sick, but in just how many ways? The encounters serve the purpose of pushing Mona toward self-acceptance, often by calling to mind her own past, and indeed her relationship with her father is a recurring theme that is dredged up by her present situation.

A fuller version of Mona soon emerges, one apathetic and emotionally-distant not through some hip disaffection but rather the chaos and distrust of her past. The metaphor of cleaning takes on a whole new slant, a constant movement toward purity that is doomed to perpetual action, just as Mona’s attempts to reconnect with herself and others allows long swept memories to surface.

Unlike Homes’s Novak, Jen Beagin’s Mona cannot free herself from cynicism long enough to embrace any potential cure, though there is a similarity in how proximity to bizarre beliefs and lifestyles encourage the development of one’s own. Maybe a full embrace of one’s position and life, contrary to any outside expectation or criticism, is a noble and valuable pursuit. Which is to say, for Mona, perhaps cleaning could have a spiritual function? No book, no psychic seeing, no pyjama-clad, lotus-positioned observance of the setting sun can be sure of saving one’s life. But perhaps the idea can trigger something more practical. Something better than pretending to be dead.

Pretend I’m Dead is out now via OneWorld (UK) and Simon & Schuster (US).

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Taking the title from Stein’s quote, Tommy Orange’s debut novel There, There applies a similar sentiment to the Native American experience in contemporary America. Told from a multitude of perspectives, the work is a tapestry of voices that forms a picture of indigenous life in Oakland, California. This structure can be tied to the role of Dene Oxendene, one of the book’s characters who is granted funding to collect the stories of American Indian people around the city. Each chapter begins with the name of the person focused on there, allowing the novel to read like a carefully arranged archive, specific and highly personal stories curated to tell a loose, community-based narrative.

Though maybe community is the wrong word, or at least could be taken as such. Because the stereotypical impression of an Indian community is as condescending as it is reductive, flattening the people into permanent mourners or warriors who band together through some profound sense of belonging, a group sage and wise and vaguely mystic, as though permanently tapped into the very essence of history and nature itself. Through a chorus of voices that spans several generations, Orange fights homogeneity and cultivates humanity, breathing air into the flat representation of indigenous people, inflating them into their full, 3D shape once more.

With this in mind, the relevance of Stein’s quote is brought into relief. Which is to say, Orange’s title is a lamentation of sorts, though not quite of the manner one might expect. The cliched perspective would like to imagine it as a plaintive evocation of a land now lost, a desire to return to the spiritual harmony of bygone eras where man and beast and earth itself lived in sympathetic peace. A sensation born of some spirit in the bloodline, something that persevered throughout the persecution and war and disease and famine, a sense of history and belonging burned within the soul of a people now and forever. Indeed, for whatever reason, it seems almost necessary from a white perspective to imagine such a thing. Perhaps it is easier to live with violence if you know the victims possess the character to endure it? Or maybe we need to project a transcendental form of identity to compensate for some fundamental lack within our own history, like some quaint, far off proof that higher meaning is possible, and we are not alone.

But the characters here have not lost their land, because their land is urban Oakland. People who “came to know the downtown Oakland skyline better than we did any sacred mountain range, the redwoods in the Oakland hills better than any other deep wild forest.” Rather, it is the spirit that is being lost. The sense of identity and belonging that we like to ascribe. Indeed, Tommy Orange could be said to have flipped the white expectation, the “no there there” referring to personal and communal Indianness, and not the stage upon which this can be enacted. There, There is map of reactions to this, ranging from the apoplectic to apathetic—a web of characters trying to figure out how to square their own view of their heritage with that of those around them, as well as the world at large.

Some, such as janitor Thomas Frank and young Orvil Red Feather, find a drumbeat within their hearts, pounding out a longing to more fully immerse themselves within their ancestral culture. However, Orange complicates things by delving into the idea of performance and invented identity. Yes, Orvil finds healing magic within powwow music, but then his brother finds the same within Chance the Rapper and Earl Sweatshirt, and the other in the arrangements of Beethoven. And, when Orvil films himself dancing in traditional clothing, the act is a half-satisfying tug-of-war between holy and phony, an attempt at realisation rather than realisation itself. Still, Orvil perseveres, determined to dance at the upcoming Powwow where the novel’s characters converge, and finds value within his quest. Because a Native search for meaning is much like any other, a process of belief and faith that depends not on some sacred arrangement of sounds and rituals but rather the commitment to the cause. Identity need not be a binary presence or absence, but something to be discovered, nurtured, or dropped.

Gertrude Stein’s passage containing the “there there” quote continues along such lines. “It is a funny thing about addresses where you live.” she writes. “When you live there you know it so well that it is like an identity […] then years after you do not know what the address was and when you say it is not a name anymore but something you cannot remember. That is what makes your identity not a thing that exists but something you do or do not remember.” Which is to say, Indianness is not something inherent and inviolable at the core of all things, nor is it something that can be eradicated forever. Rather, it is the product of what is remembered, and what is not. There can be a there there, Tommy Orange seems to say, and one defined not by white fantasy, but the Natives themselves. It is just a case of remembering.

There, There is out now via Harvill Secker (UK) and Knopf (US).

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