Reading Tommy Orange's There There is a challenge but worth the effort

I won't minimize the difficulty one must overcome to read tommy Orange's novel, There There - many characters introduced in a string of short chapters most of which could stand alone as stories - w/ at first tenuous connections linking the characters and their stories. So much to keep in mind - a trend I think in stories about large ethnic communities or families, cf Urrea's The House of Broken Angels, and I do wish these authors would make it a little easier to engage w/ their work - but in the case of the best of these complex-web novels such as this one the effort to engage is well spent. Orange writes about a community that is far from the literary mainstream - Native American (or Native) populations in East Oakland - and no doubt unfamiliar to the vast majority of his readership. W/out having read the author's note nor in fact anything at all about Orange, I'm supposing he has direct ties to this community, and, to his credit, his view of the community is unflinching and not at all romanticized: Many of the characters have a great ethnic pride, others seem indifferent to their race. Most of the characters suffer from extreme poverty and broken families; some make sincere efforts to pull their lives together (one for example receives an arts grant to do a documentary film about the community, another gets a decent job at a Native American community center); others succumb to crime and addiction (some do both: One character struggling w/ her alcoholism has done a lot of fine community work). The novel centers on - and it takes a while for this point to come into focus - a planned great powwow in Oakland; some of the characters are planning this event, others planning to attend, others planning to commit some kind of robbery or heist at the event to pay off debts to drug dealers - so you can see the range of characters and personalities in this novel. I'm more than half-way and will surely finish, but I'd be smart to keep on the side a set of notes about these characters and their relationships - familiar, social, or just crossing lines on the network of this narrative.