Tommy Orange’s novel There There jumps through time and among the voices of 12 narrators, but its sense of place is constant and intentional. From the first chapter, you’re dropped into Oakland, California, biking from the Coliseum BART station to “Deep East Oakland, off Seventy-Third, across from where the Eastmont Mall used to be, until things got so bad there they turned it into a police station.” Over the course of the novel, the characters’ stories weave together, until they are all in one building for an emotional, chaotic powwow in the Oakland Coliseum.
“I love Oakland and Oakland is my home,” Orange told CityLab over the phone from Angels Camp, California, where he lives now. “It’s not very well presented in novels. I don’t even know if I could name one, where somebody from Oakland wrote a novel about [it].” (Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue “has more of a Berkeley feel to it,” he says.)
