In the current economy of publishing, and by extension books coverage, debut novels take up such a disproportionate share of attention that it feels relatively rare to encounter a sophomore attempt treated with similar fanfare. Inevitably, debut mania makes it harder for authors to build and sustain careers over the long-term (as does consolidation in publishing, a wide disparity 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 does attract 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 by skipping from one generation to the next. Orange's characters endure residential schools, demeaning jobs, and increasingly get sucked into addiction. The second 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 Orange's debut.

Wandering Stars was not initially advertised as a sequel (and prequel) to There There, and I read it before catching up with the first novel, which has been sitting patiently on my shelf for years. Reading this book, it's hard not to think about the pressures that novelists face following a successful debut. So few writers are lucky enough to find success with a first book at all, and practically nobody experiences the kind of acclaim that Orange did; by extension, almost nobody faces the task of trying to follow up such a debut. Orange's position is complicated by the fact that Native American authors are even fewer and farther between. 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 this year's Killers of the Flower Moon, and novelists including Jessica Johns and Amanda Peters), Orange still evidently feels the burden of responsibility to educate his readers that white authors don't bear. 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 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's psychology but rather in the broader tapestry Orange creates: his sprawling cast includes the Redfeather family (who return in Wandering Stars), distant relations of that family who don't know they're related, 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 rushing metaphorical sentences: "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 student, who 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 or even decades 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.2 There's no reason a novelist today couldn't try to do the same, but There There isn't the book to start such a project with; as a result, Wandering Stars can't help feeling like Orange just couldn't let go of the characters to whom he'd grown attached.

Orange's writing about addiction, the primary theme of this book, also feels lacking. Though some scenes of Orvil's descent into addiction for prescription drugs are affecting, he shows up for his family when they most need him, and the book ends with a maddening first-person chapter from him that reads like an inspirational personal essay, or perhaps a motivational speech. Of the covid pandemic, 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." This is undoubtedly true, but as a throwaway paragraph, it feels superficial. 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. Here, too, it's impossible not to feel Orange's affection for his characters, almost as though they were real people for whom he feels obliged to provide a full history. 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; still, this muddled approach doesn't makes for an interesting book.

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.")

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."

Reading Monkey Grip, it makes sense that it has diaristic origins: its scenes can be short and choppy, and its profusion of characters sometimes confusing (which of course 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). 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 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 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. 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 Gracie. "The fearful reader," Groff writes, is left to examine her uptight, bourgeois assumptions" about the child and the mother-child relationship.

The genius of the novel lies in its refusal to explain, or pass judgement, while also depicting Nora's life and Javo's predicament with often distressing specificity. Javo goes away and comes back again; goes away and comes back; Nora can't give him up. In this way, although Garner (and Nora) persistently evade moral judgment, Monkey Grip makes for a brutally effective depiction of addiction. The same patterns play out again and again, with Nora trying to steel herself against Javo or relinquishing herself to him. 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. But although she won't say that she hates dope, she can clearly see its effects on him:

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.

Nora and Javo both keep up smokescreens, trying to maintain their ideals while their relationship is destroyed by his addiction. Nora's persistent adherence to her anti-establishment principles both gives her life structure and prevents her from articulating, to herself or to others, how unhappy she is. She wants to be in a relationship with Javo, for instance, but that is not possible because of his addiction, and her 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, but it is one thing to have a set of ideas about how you should live your life, and another thing to follow them.

Nora does not experience a grand revelation or epiphany, which feels true to Garner's diary source; people usually don't. Though she has said that she is on good terms with the man who served as the model for Javo, who got clean and now has a family, she doesn't write about this in her novel. Instead, Javo (not clean) moves onto another woman, and Nora must get on with her life — and her daughter — as well.