Tommy Orange’s ‘Wandering Stars’ Traces a Family's Scars Across Six Generations

Anyone who’s lived with someone experiencing addiction — or dealt with it themselves — knows how it can plunge entire families into chaos. The damage feels personal. While experts agree that addiction often stems from other types of suffering, we have yet to contend with how collective trauma might factor into today’s overdose epidemic.

In Oakland author Tommy Orange’s capable hands, addiction that stems from the United States’ violent past and present comes into sharp focus. Orange’s new novel, Wandering Stars (out Feb. 27 via Knopf), tells a story, a century-and-a-half long, of a family descended from Jude Star, a survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864. After most of Star’s community is brutally murdered, white colonizers imprison him and subject him to violent, forced assimilation. He ends up drinking to cope with a psychic wound so deep that it ripples through six generations.

Orange himself is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes; his ancestors also survived the Sand Creek Massacre. He chose addiction as the throughline of Wandering Stars because of its impact on his own family.

“The things that affect your life are what you end up writing about or obsessing over,” he says. “I also wanted to write it in a way … that would make the reader understand and have compassion for the characters, and where addiction comes from. Sometimes it’s treated as this moral failing. … But the way that I approach it is much more medicinal — a way to cope that sort of gets out of control.”

Part One of Wandering Stars arrives in short, dreamlike dispatches from the past, where Orange switches perspective, from first to second to third person, as he gives us glimpses into characters such as Star’s son Charles, an aspiring writer. Hope glimmers throughout Wandering Stars when characters use art and storytelling to process tragedy — in Charles’ case, the unspeakable abuses at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. He eventually winds up in Oakland, where his descendants stay rooted for generations to come.

Orange’s world-building is somewhat sparse as he covers three generations across the first 100 pages. With experimental writing both poetic and poignant, it doesn’t read as straight-ahead historical fiction. The reader often ends up piecing facts together hazily, as if through clouds of smoke.

Orange’s universe becomes more vivid when we arrive in 2018 for Part Two, called “Aftermath.” There, we meet the youngest of Star’s descendants, Orvil, Lony and Loother Red Feather. (The three boys first appeared in Orange’s 2018 Pulitzer-nominated debut, There There, in which 14-year-old Orvil survives a senseless act of violence.)

In Wandering Stars, Orvil gets hooked on opioids while in treatment. It turns out the opioids also soothe the buried pain of surviving his mother’s heroin addiction and suicide, and Orvil keeps chasing the high.

About two-thirds of Wandering Stars is spent with these adolescent boys, their newly sober grandmother Jacquie — who’s just re-entered the picture after multiple disappearances — and Opal, the great-aunt who raised them. Orange gives their household so much texture that it’s easy for the reader to feel like they’re a part of this dysfunctional, lovable family. The brothers’ adolescent foolishness lends occasional comic relief, and the grandmothers’ fragile hope as they rebuild their relationship brings an anxious tenderness.

Poignantly, each character harbors inner struggles that — given Orange’s long view of history — feel as if they’ve cascaded down from the events of 1864, whether the characters consciously realize it or not.

It’s impossible to read Wandering Stars and not think about our relationship to this stolen land, and that the United States is built upon despicable violence that most of us have been conditioned to at best ignore, and at worst to glorify. Even though the subject is deeply personal for Orange, writing about it, he says, was cathartic.

“Working the language to more clearly express certain kinds of pain and weight,” he says, “frees energy, or it transforms things, in a way that feels liberating.”

Wandering Stars brings clarity to how atrocities — historical and present-day — can scar an entire lineage. That theme has the power to resonate with readers of all backgrounds, and invites us to reexamine the bigger context of our own lives. This is a book that will change you: I sobbed, unable to put it down, for the final 100 pages.

Some of Orange’s characters, like the author himself, eventually move from surviving towards healing.

“I think I’m still figuring it out,” Orange admits. “I think the way to heal is thinking about harm. How much harm are you bringing to yourself? How much harm are you bringing to others? And trying to reduce that until it’s not there anymore. And transforming that into helping yourself, helping other people. I think that’s the path of healing.”