February 27, 2024

Sophomore Slumps and Addiction in "Wandering Stars" (and "Monkey Grip")

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In the current economy of publishing, and by extension books coverage too, debut novels take up such a disproportionate share of attention that it feels comparatively rare to encounter a sophomore attempt receiving similar fanfare. Inevitably, debut mania makes it harder for authors to build and sustain careers over the long-term (to say nothing of consolidation in publishing, wide disparities in advances, and the general state of the economy), and many novelists don't get to publish a second book at all.¹

Occasionally, though, a debut makes such a splash that the author's follow-up inevitably attracts significant attention. Tommy Orange's first novel, There There (2018), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and named one of the New York Times Book Review's Ten Best Books of the Year. This week, he publishes his second novel, Wandering Stars, which serves as both a prequel and a sequel to There There. The first part of the book, which begins in the nineteenth century, dramatizes the Sand Creek Massacre (1864) and its aftermath, skipping briskly from one generation to the next until it arrives at characters Orange introduced in his debut. These characters endure residential schools, demeaning jobs, and are increasingly plagued by addiction. The second and longer part of the book picks up where There There left off, after a shooting at a powwow at the Oakland Coliseum (home of the Oakland A's). Here, too, characters struggle with addiction, including Orvil Redfeather, a teenage victim of the shooting who appeared prominently in There There.

I read Wandering Stars before catching up with There There, and as I read, I found it hard not to think about the pressures that novelists face following a successful debut. Orange must have felt that the stakes were especially high for him since practically nobody receives the kind of acclaim that he did for There There. His position is further complicated by the fact that this success was especially rare for a Native American author. Though other Native artists have received attention and acclaim since 2018 (the cast and crew of Reservation Dogs; Lily Gladstone and her Native colleagues on Killers of the Flower Moon, and novelists including Jessica Johns and Amanda Peters), white authors don't bear the same responsibility to educate their readers that Orange does. As he tells Vanity Fair, "After spending a long time living with people’s incorrect, often offensive versions of what happened historically to Native people in this country, I think writing There There and now Wandering Stars is part of handling that responsibility."

I'm sympathetic to Orange's feeling of responsibility, and the pressure he also must have experienced in crafting Wandering Stars; unfortunately, these less-than-ideal conditions for making art have resulted in a messy and unsatisfying book, or really two books shoved into one volume. Neither Orange's exploration of the history of his Cheyenne characters, nor his follow-up to the events of There There, has enough space to breathe; the historical section feels rushed, and the contemporary section oddly directionless.

When I picked up There There, I was relieved to discover that it was as good as everyone had said. That novel's success, though, lies not in any individual character gripping the reader but rather in the broader tapestry Orange creates: his sprawling cast includes the Redfeather family (who return in Wandering Stars), characters responsible for or connected to the shooting (which looms ominously throughout the novel), and other members of the community. The flow of experiences accelerates as the shooting nears, bursting out into sentences that rush and judder: "A bullet is a thing so fast it's hot and so hot it's mean and so straight it moves clean through a body, makes a hole, tears, burns, exits, goes on, hungry, or it remains, cools, lodges, poisons. When a bullet opens you up, blood pours like out of a mouth too full." The book is satisfying less as a narrative than as an object, a masterfully constructed piece of art.

In Wandering Stars, by contrast, Orange feels like an author who can't let go of characters to whom he's become overly emotionally attached. When I was in graduate school, I attended a brilliant paper given by a PhD student² who (as best as I can recall) discussed the careers of William Thackeray and Anthony Trollope through a similar lens. Both these novelists spent much of their lives writing long sequences of novels, which allowed them to continue writing about characters to whom they had grown attached for years at a time. This expansive creative worldview suited the nineteenth century realist novel, which could mimic real families and communities of people, and grow wider and wider as novelists published more and more books.³ It is not suited to a book like There There, which is shorter and moves more through mood and energy than traditional plot, and Wandering Stars can't help feel like an extraneous addition to a book that was satisfying and complete on its own.

Orange's writing about addiction, the primary theme of this book, also feels lacking. Though some scenes of Orvil's descent into prescription drug addiction (a result of his shooting injury) are affecting, Orange can also fall into sentimental traps and give his characters easy ways out of their dilemmas. Orvil conveniently shows up just in time for an important family gathering, for example, and the book concludes with a maddening first-person chapter from him in which he sums up his journey through rehab and recovery. This chapter reads like an inspirational personal essay, or perhaps a motivational speech. If Orvil were a real person, his recovery story might be useful to people struggling with addiction, but he is a fictional character, and his words fall flat. Of the covid pandemic, for example, he writes, "It hit a lot of addicts the worst. With all that time. A bunch of people in the circles I knew directly, or knew about up there in the foothills, died. Without structure and with that much time and with the world feeling like it was over, getting fucked up almost seemed logical." While these insights are undoubtedly true, they are the stuff of sociology, not fiction.

Orvil goes on to talk about getting through rehab, joining a band, and working for UPS, and updates us on his relationships with other characters. It's impossible not to feel Orange's affection for his characters in this chapter, almost as though they were real people for whom he feels obliged to provide a full history. He wants Orvil to be okay — and shouldn't we, too? It feels churlish to complain about Orange's depiction of addiction when he's also said that the history of addiction in his family has informed his desire to write about the topic. But compelling fiction is made out of conflict, and great books often leave us with questions (as There There does). If Orvil were real, I'd wish him well. Since he's not, I found his tidy resolution irritating.

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Monkey Grip (1977), Helen Garner's debut novel, provides an interesting contrast to Wandering Stars. A phenomenon upon its original publication in Australia, the novel is only now making its way to America, as part of a seven-book deal with Pantheon. (Last year, they released Garner's short novel The Children's Bach and This House of Grief, "a story of a murder trial.") Garner conveys the frustration and monotony of addiction through the form of her novel, in which certain interactions and relationships repeat themselves over and over, with no hope of real progress. I found reading the novel stressful, but despite what this description might suggest, it's never boring.

Monkey Grip was based closely on Garner's own experiences in the seventies, when she was a single mother and in a fraught relationship with a man who was addicted to heroin. As she explains in an interview with Kevin Koczwara, "I was writing about it in my diary all along and I started to see the curve in it. I thought, this is actually a story. It's not just my life plotting from day to day with no shape. I began to see that there was a shape to it and that made me feel really excited." Upon publication, the autobiographical nature of the novel caused some controversy; as Garner explains, "I had 'just published my diary.' But I had done a hell of a lot of work on it as well."

When I discovered that Monkey Grip had diaristic origins, I could see some of the original document's shape in the finished product: the novel's scenes can be short and choppy, and its profusion of characters sometimes confusing (which wouldn't be the case if you knew them all as real people). It's also, though, undeniably a work of fiction, in the sense that it challenges the reader's instinctive opinions of the narrator, Nora (Garner's surrogate), and asks complex questions about addiction and life more broadly without providing easy answers. Unlike Orange, and many other writers of fiction and nonfiction about addiction, Nora is stubbornly amoral about drugs and addiction, despite her paramour Javo's dependence on heroin, or "dope" as the characters in the novel say. Over and over again, Javo, looking for a fight, insists that Nora hates dope; Nora, who takes drugs recreationally herself (mainly cocaine) but never intravenously, insists that she doesn't. It's undeniable, though, that Javo's addiction is decimating his life. He can't stay in a stable relationship (he shows up at Nora's shared house, sometimes staying, sometimes going), occasionally stealing money from her and her housemates, gets arrested and thrown into jail on a trip to Bangkok, and can't hold a job despite his occasional forays into work in the theater.

Despite all this, it takes Nora a terribly long time to get over him. In the meantime, she's sleeping with other men she knows and with whom she's friendly. The Melbourne bohemian set of which she and Javo are a part try hard to exist outside the dominant rules of culture, which include monogamous heterosexual relationships (and sobriety). Nora's young daughter, Gracie, goes to school and is a cheerful child, but she also has what cannot help but seem like an alarmingly intimate knowledge of drug use and addiction. (In one scene, another child walks in on Nora helping Javo inject himself.) Nora is a loving mother, but she also sends Gracie away to stay with friends (the details of this are always vague) for weeks at a time, and Gracie often recedes in the narrative, leaving the reader to wonder about her perspective and experiences.

The genius of the novel lies in its refusal to explain or pass judgement on its characters while also depicting Nora's life and Javo's predicament with distressing specificity. Although Nora won't say that she hates dope, she can clearly see its effects on Javo:

He looked wrecked, filthy, dressed in ragged jeans. Through two horizontal tears in the front of the jeans I could see his thighs, their white skin. His hair was matted, his right eye was all red and swollen was styes, he scratched constantly. I wanted to pierce his bravado, ask him for the truth, but these days his ego was invested in keeping that brave smokescreen well in place. I felt like crying.

Javo never lets his bravado drop, although he does repeatedly claim he's going out of town to get clean, while Nora keeps up her own facade of self-control. Though she claims to others, and herself, that she doesn't care what Javo does, where he goes, or who he sleeps with, she's privately distressed by his behavior, as she's distressed by his dismal physical condition.

The pattern of the novel is predictable: Javo goes away and comes back again; goes away and comes back. Although Nora can see that he won't change his behavior, she continues to take him back. In this way, although Garner (and Nora) persistently avoid moral judgments, Monkey Grip makes for a brutally effective depiction of addiction. Javo, for his part, rarely pushes himself on Nora, apart from showing up at her house. She is addicted to him, as he is addicted to dope. This precarious arrangement is possible in part because they both belong to a community in which monogamous relationships are seen as passé. By committing to these anti-establishment principles, Nora invests in a set of ideals that prevents her from articulating, to herself or to others, how unhappy she is. She wants to be in a relationship with Javo, for instance, that is not possible because of his addiction, and this desire also undermines her free sexual experiences with other men. These men also want a more conventional or committed relationship than they are supposed to, according to the unwritten rules of their group. It is one thing to have a set of ideas about how you should live your life, and another thing to follow them.

By revealing the cracks in this bohemian worldview, Garner isn't implicitly endorsing a more conservative one. The book refuses to provide easy answers or explanations to any of its central questions. It would be easy, for instance, to see Nora's daughter Gracie as a victim of her mother's lifestyle; as I read the book, I found myself fretting about her proximity to drugs and her mother's frequent inattention. As Lauren Groff points out in her introduction to this new edition, it's impossible not to be worried on Gracie's behalf, yet Garner never lets anything bad happen to her. "The fearful reader," Groff writes, "is left to examine her uptight, bourgeois assumptions" about the child and the mother-child relationship.

In the end, Nora does not experience a grand revelation or epiphany, nor does she reconcile with Javo, or part from him on satisfying terms. At the end of the novel, Javo, who is still not clean, moves onto another woman, where presumably his cycle of departure and return. Nora must get on with her life as well. Funnily enough, the man who inspired Javo did get clean a couple years later, and now has a family (Garner remains on good terms with him). It's nice to know that in real life, this can happen. Garner's novelistic instincts were right, though, not to invent this conclusion for her book. Instead, the end of Monkey Grip feels ironically both literary and true to both life and addiction, which resist resolution in favor of going on, and on, and on.