By: Katherine Xiong

“Wandering Stars,” Tommy Orange’s 2024 companion to his acclaimed 2018 debut “There There,” is an ambitious expansion of the lives of its constellation of characters. Anchored in the family history of a Cheyenne family displaced from their homeland to Oakland, California, the novel centers on addiction, generational trauma, storytelling and the making of one’s own identity in the aftermath of settler colonial violence.  

“Wandering Stars'” action begins with the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, in which the U.S. Army murdered 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho elders, women and children. The novel then traces the massacre’s tragic aftermath through five generations of the family and through other violent colonial acts, including the abuse and neglect of Native American children and the cultural genocide perpetrated by Native American boarding schools like the American Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the late 1800s.  

The novel’s three parts are linked by the titular motif of wandering stars: first, the star-shaped Fort Marion in Florida to which the first of the Star family Jude Star was forced to ‘wander’; second, the star-shaped scar left by a bullet embedded in Jude Star’s great-great-grandson Orvil’s body, which must be monitored to present it form wandering through his body and killing him long after his shooting. 

As Orange’s narrative unfolds from these multiple perspectives, he makes it clear that “killing” can be a single act of violence or its memory which refuses to leave the body. Here, Orange brilliantly expands on the Star family’s third “wandering,” their forced displacement and struggle to make a better future in the wake of violence. As Orange writes in the second-person narration of Victoria Bear Shield, great grandmother of Orvil Red Feather: 

The novel brilliantly refracts racist, colonial violence through multiple voices. Orange skillfully manipulates verb tense (past, present, future), narrative perspective (first, second, third person) and modes of communication (speaking, writing, singing). Characters’ voices are frequently interrupted as they vomit, choke and go mute; their ability to translate experience into words falls apart as they grapple with pain, dream and get high. 

This instability, combined with unreliable narrators, allows Orange to shine a light into the intense, explosive violence of U.S. imperialist “settlement” and the cultural genocide suffered by the native peoples. The consequences of non-military violence, such as starvation, beatings, shootings, drug abuse and adoption of native children by white parents who withhold their origins, are just as harmful as bullets: one kills the body, the other another kills the story of a people.

This approach does have narrative drawbacks, namely that one character’s story never belongs to that character alone. At times Wandering Stars reads more like a narration of history channeled through multiple characters rather than an organic collection of characters’ unique experiences. The Star family tends to be accurate historians of their own experience even when a character’s story centers on the denial of that experience, as in the case of Victoria Bear Shield.

Conveying generational trauma—which manifests as repeating patterns and experiences—in the form of a novel also has its limits. Orange’s descriptions of different generations’ experience of an inherited trauma, such as addiction, often use the same sets of symbols and motifs. This echoing can be frustrating for the reader, making it seem like every character experiences these traumas in the exact same way. The novel’s rich, distinct characters thus lose some of their color. 

That may be the point. Wandering Stars challenges us readers to consider how we may not stand alone outside of our histories, but are beholden to a whole constellation of difficult inheritances. In other words, if these characters never make it out of the patterned loops of addiction and generational trauma, it’s because they’re hard cycles to break. 

“Wandering Stars” sees a way out of the legacy of violence and destruction. Though everything in Orvil’s life and the lives of his ancestors gets worse before it gets better, Wandering Stars eventually focuses on Orvil’s transformation and the suggestion of a hopeful future. 

If you can get through the novel’s structural challenges, Orange’s precise, beautiful language and complex themes of historical inheritance and memory makes Wandering Stars a difficult but worthwhile read. 

Wandering Stars | By Tommy Orange | Random House | 2024 | 336 pp. | $29

Katherine Xiong is a writer and Buffalo Hive book critic. you can find more information about her and her work here.