The challenge of bringing a narrative to conclusion - in There There

Tommy Orange's debut novel, There There, about the Native American community in Oakland, gets off to a great start, then founders. Orange creates vivid portraits of a # of characters, each shedding some light on the current status of urban-living Natives (O's preferred term), dealing w/ poverty, addiction, broken families, a history of prejudice and injustice. He doesn't flinch from creating unsympathetic characters, and he creates an intricate web - for me at times too intricate, I had to constantly check back to ascertain the complex family relationships among the characters eventually resorting to some note-taking - that links the many of the characters. He also builds the plot carefully, as the narrative moves toward a grand conclusion at a Native powwow at the Oakland Coliseum. It becomes obvious that all of the characters, and plot lines, will converge at the powwow, with several possible dramatic revelations, e.g., a young man on the planning committee will meet for the first time his estranged father, now the emcee. That said, Orange doesn't quite rise to the challenge of bringing the narrative to an emotional conclusion - in fact (spoiler here) he ends the narrative with a huge shoot-out at the powwow, as some of his characters make good on their plan to rob the till at the event. Several of the characters get shot to death (Orange does a good job creating what I imagine to be the feelings, fears, emotion of someone shot in ambush), others survive, but the plot is in tatters - none of the characters seems transformed, awakened, anything - just dead (or not). Somehow, I think, he should have done more w/ this tragic event - perhaps shown its aftermath, or its effect on the survivors. What we're left w/ is a novel w/ some really fine character sketches - many like short stories in their own right - and a rather bleak, if incomplete, portrait of a little-known (to most readers) community ; had the potential to be an urban Erdrich, but doesn't quite rise to the challenge - though I do expect more work from Orange and hope for a novel w/ more depth and fewer pyrotechnics in the future.