We are introduced to the obese Edwin Black, living out his grand dreams in the seclusion of his mother’s house, but brought low by banal reality Black is both literally and metaphorically constipated.

Yet many of the other strands are lighter and more optimistic, encapsulating the breadth of human experience. The book steers clear of the antique romance of the open plains for that, as Orange wryly notes: “we have… Kevin Costner saving us, John Wayne slaying us an Italian guy named Iron Eyes Cody playing our parts in movies”. Orange, himself a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes of Oklahoma, deals not just with several centuries of oppression of the Native American community (which a brief, dryly witty prologue deals with in a devastatingly matter-of-fact way), but how rites and tradition can seem comically anachronistic in a world of “glass, metal, rubber, and wires, the speed, the hurtling masses” in which “the city took us in”. The novel centres on the interconnected lives of a group of Native Americans – or Indians, as they call themselves, determined to reclaim a term more often used disparagingly.

Oakland happens also to be Orange’s home town and provides the setting for the book, which has attracted many admiring reviews in the US. T he title of Tommy Orange’s bold debut novel is a reference to Gertrude Stein’s line about the city of her childhood, Oakland, California: “there is no there there”, she wrote.

There there tommy