Second novels can be gawky creatures, sulky and strained as they try to slink out of the shadows of their predecessors. Will the second novel follow the formula, or repudiate it and chance something new? ... Wandering Stars, calmly and cannily, has it both ways ... But it is a different tempo, a different ambition—almost a different writer—we encounter in Wandering Stars. Where There There shoots forward with a linear trajectory, the new novel maunders and meanders. Repetition is its organizing principle ... With this expansive canvas to fill, Orange can seem perpetually out of time and out of breath. A few key characters are quick smudges, scarcely more than their signifiers ... The book appears to suffer from the same condition as its characters; it cannot see itself, cannot see that it need not hammer home every theme every time, that it speeds where it should saunter, tarries where we need to move. And yet it expands and expands—why not throw in a subplot about a suburban pill mill?—with such exuberance that even at its most sprawling and diffuse, I wondered: Is this novel flailing or dancing? ... What if this billowy book is intended to open a series of small doors, but for the reader?
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