Impressive accomplishments in Urrea's House of Broken Angels

In the end, there are many impressive accomplishments in Luis Roberto Urrea's new novel, The House of Broken Angels, including some snappy dialogue, a great scene of partial reconciliation between the two de la Cruz half-brothers on the verge of the imminent death of Big Angel (family patriarch and heart of this novel), a raucous account of mucho eating, drinking, flirting, and genera carousing at Big Angels 70th and final birthday party, some good passages that present in microcosm some of the history of the de la Cruz family, in particular its emigration north from Mexico to the San Diego area. This novel is the absolute antagonist of minimalist fiction - so many characters, so many relationships, so many plot elements, some of them developed in full, others left open. As noted in several previous posts, it can be a challenge to read this novel and it would probably pay off to read it twice (which I will probably do, as it's our book-group selection for next month); it's a novel of great ambition, and a success for the most part - the dramatic and threatening confrontation near the end of the book seems to come out of nowhere as we hardly know the central character in this scene; the sheer abundance of characters and incidents can lead to confusion at a # of points (a family tree would have helped!), we really don't know enough about the half-brother Little Angel, the only one who has migrated away from this family and who's reconciliation w/ Big Angel is probably the key moment in the novel - perhaps Little Angel (who, from the author's extensive note at the end of the novel, seems to be the character closest biographical detail to Urrea) may be the protagonist in a future novel - Urrea seems to have more material in his (real and imagined) family life to populate more than one novel.