Selling a world is hard.

This is true of science fiction and fantasy, but even more so for literary novels. Inconsistencies in invented worlds can be explained away through further invention, while reality has no such excuse.

I’ve particularly noticed this in novels that are, for lack of a better term, family stories. In this category I put White Teeth by Zadie Smith, There, There  by Tommy Orange and The House of Broken Angels by Luis Alberto Urrea. Each book is intricately wrought, weaving different perspectives across generations in the past and present to an ultimate, dramatic conclusion, with guns drawn. The way these novels succeed or fail in selling these extraordinary endings to ordinary stories intrigues me.   

The novels, it should be noted, are unlikely bedfellows, compared mostly because they happened to be ones I read. White Teeth tells the story of at least four families over decades, while There, There tackles a few weeks with flashbacks and House of Broken Angels takes place over roughly 48 hours and concerns itself mainly with a single family. The Commonwealth milieu of White Teeth is distinct from the Native communities of Oakland in There, There and from the Mexican American De La Cruz family of The House of Broken Angels.

All three are enjoyable, engaging reads. The characters are unexpected, delightful, and feel utterly real. It is, perhaps, because the novels do such a good job of selling their respective stories that the overblown endings of White Teeth and There, There felt like a bit of a letdown.

This is not the say the endings are bad. White Teeth is slightly absurdist from the start, so the overly convoluted confluence of nearly every significant character for the climatic finally is not unexpected. There, There begins with a devastating essay about violence inflicted on Native communities, and the ending — another barely plausible re-union scene ending in a mass shootout — has a narrative logic to it.

I found, however, something jarring about them both. In real life there are no coincidental climaxes, where disparate characters from across the generations arrive just in time for a great showdown. People do get shot in real life, but the extravagant violence, particularly in There, There, where a straightforward robbery gone wrong turns into a mass casualty event, breaks the illusion of reality.

But The House of Broken Angels manages to pull off the climatic ending — re-union, reconciliation, even a gun — by curbing its drama. Urrea sets the plot around a birthday party, the perfect excuse to bring everyone together. As much as the other two novels, perhaps even more so, The House of Broken Angels deals with extreme experiences — violence, abuse, murder, sex, crime, poverty, addiction. But they all feel more real, not less so, by being slightly undersold and, frequently, awkward.

The climatic conclusion finally arrives, an estranged child turns up just as a gunman turns up to settle a score, the moment is defused, the gun dropped, the gunman flees. The threatened escalation from familial drama to violence and blood is rapidly brought back into the realm of the real.

Chekov’s gun is a rule for writing satisfying narratives, not realistic ones. But in the real world we are used to untidy endings, to threatened disasters that end up being underwhelming, in a certain sense, to disappointment. If the world being sold is ours, a little narrative dissatisfaction can make it feel just that little bit more real.