Reading Tommy Orange's <i>There There</i> as Crime Fiction: Identity and the Poetry of Urban Life

This essay examines Tommy Orange's novel There There through the lens of crime fiction, proposing that reading the novel as a mirrored or reversed crime plot allows for a unique exploration of Indigenous identity in urban spaces. The author argues that Orange's portrayal of the city of Oakland defies traditional crime fiction tropes and challenges the notion that urban landscapes can reliably represent and reconstruct history. The essay analyses the novel's use of mirrored images, its subversion of detective figures like Tony Loneman, and its portrayal of blood as an unreliable marker of identity. Ultimately, the essay contends that by inverting the crime fiction plot, There There directs the reader's attention towards constructing the future rather than restoring the past, offering an inversion of the satisfaction that crime fiction offers to readers.