A challenging novel (in stories) on Native Americans in Oakland - There There - gets off to a fine start

Tommy Orange's new novel, There There (a reference some will get to the city he's writing about, Oakland), gets off to a great start. After a prologue recounting many of the atrocities and massacres and humiliations and misinterpretations forced upon various Native populations in the Americas, he focuses on the small community of Natives (his preferred term) in Oakland, most of whom are living in poverty. (It's a seldom-if-ever chronicled population; does recall the fine film about Natives in SF, The Exiles.) At first it seems that we're reading a story collection that can only by loose definition can be considered a novel, but over the course of the reading - I'm only about 25% in, first 4 chapters - we see that there are connections and threads slowly developing and emerging. Each of the first 4 chapters is about a different Native in Oakland: the first about a young many suffering the effects of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, he calls himself a "Drome," who gets involved with the drug trade in E. Oakland and makes incipient plans to rob a huge Native convention - a Powwow - to take place in the city; obviously, there will be more to come on that. 2nd chapter is about a young man whose uncle, who works as a gaffer in the film industry, has a dream of making a movie about Natives; the uncle dies, and the young man picks up his vision (and equipment) and wins a grant to do a film that will consist of unedited interview on camera w/ many Natives in Oakland: Each of us has a story to tell, he surmises. More to come on that, too. 3rd chapter, set in 1970, introduces a young woman whose family (single mom, sister) lives from eviction to eviction and eventually joins the Native takeover ot Alcatraz Island, a little-remembered episode and a failure of the first order. She will clearly appear in the present time later in this work as a voice of experience in the Native community (she would not be about 60). 4th chapter is about a young man who'd never met his Native father who studied Native American Lit in college and can't find a job; he makes contact w/ his father via the Internet, and learns his father is coming to Oakland for the powwow (see above); his mother, deeply worried about her son who is obese and spends his entire life online, gets him a job as a paid intern helping to run the forthcoming powwow. So, each chapter stands alone as a fine short story and the connects gradually emerge - making this a strange book: Easy to read chapter by chapter and a serious challenge as we try to remember the characters and connections across the course of many chapters. (Didn't Erdrich, mentioned in heroic terms in this novel, write an early work w/ the same structure?)