The Round House
by Louise Erdrich
Summary
One Sunday in the spring of 1988, on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, Geraldine Coutts is attacked and raped near the round house, the community's old ceremonial building, and comes home shaking and bloodied to a husband and son whose lives divide at that moment into before and after. Joe is thirteen. His father, Bazil, is a tribal judge, and the novel's terrible education is Joe's discovery of what his father's title is worth: because Geraldine cannot or will not say precisely where on the checkerboard of tribal, state and federal land the crime occurred, and because the attacker is white, no court may be able to touch him at all.
Erdrich folds that jurisdictional maze, the actual state of American law, into a boy's summer. Joe and his friends, Cappy, Zack and Angus, bicycle between the crime scene and the lake, Star Trek and first crushes, while Joe conducts his own investigation with a child's tools and an adult's stakes, and the novel becomes simultaneously a coming of age story, a legal thriller and a portrait of a family trying to survive a mother's retreat into her bedroom. The attacker is identified early; the question is never who but what can be done, and the answer Joe finally chooses, with Cappy beside him, costs exactly what such answers cost.
Around three hundred and thirty pages, with Erdrich's reservation world, grandmothers, priests, ghosts, gossip, at full depth around the wound.
Best for readers who want a page turner that is also an argument, narrated by a boy the reader will follow anywhere.
Historical Context & Significance
The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012, and it arrived with a public purpose declared in the afterword: the jurisdictional gap at the plot's centre, descending from the Supreme Court's Oliphant decision stripping tribal courts of authority over non Indians, was live law, and one in three Native women report being raped, mostly by non Native men. Erdrich carried its argument into that debate herself, publishing a New York Times opinion piece weeks before Congress renewed the Violence Against Women Act with expanded tribal provisions, as direct a policy shadow as American fiction casts.
It is the middle panel of what critics call her justice trilogy, between The Plague of Doves and LaRose, all set around the same fictional reservation her books have mapped since Love Medicine in 1984.
Ron Charles in the Washington Post called Joe an incredibly endearing narrator, full of urgency and radiant candor, an American child watching the law fail at close range; Erdrich's later Pulitzer for The Night Watchman completed the shelf's honours.