The Round House A Novel

I really wanted to like this book. I really wanted to hear about tribal law, reservation boundary lines, where justice gets blurry. But instead, this book dragged on an on with pointless asides and forced vulgarity. To put it plainly: I had to force myself to finish this.

5✰ Nobody else, not even Clemence, not even my mother herself, cared as much as we did about my mother. Nobody thought night and day of her. He'd met Nanapush there and together they had built the round house, the sleeping woman, the unkillable mother, the old lady buffalo. They'd built that place to keep their people together and ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth. This book is half a coming of age, half a mystery, and a bit of justice book. (Doesn't add up to 100, I know) It starts off with Joe's father, Bazil, asking him, where is your mother? That simple question changes their whole lives. Just like the roots they'e pulling out of their house, that's destroying it, in the beginning of the story, it's the start of the whole foundation of their lives, of their family, being upended. It's a very, very good book. I learned a lot about reservations and tribal history and their law. And it sucks. Like, jurisdiction laws suck. If a white man commits a crime on tribal land, they cannot be tried by the tribal court. Which is fucking ridiculous and they get away with the crime. It's basically the whole point of the book, I think. To get you thinking about how little control the Natives have over their own land and their own court systems. It was very frustrating to not want to scream most the book because of how horrible America is. There's also a great sense of community in this book. No matter how hard Joe's mother's attacker tried to ruin this sense of community, it's still there. No matter how hard the U.S. government tried to take it away, it's strong. And it's a very important part of the book. Especially the friendship between Joe and Cappy. They're best friends, they call each other brother, and would do anything for each other. That's very important to know and remember. Also, Joe is only 13, just turned 13, and his whole world gets turned upside down. But his love for his mother and father is strong, he loves them more than anything in the world. TW: rape (page 160-162 specifically)

sobbing. read this for Indigenous Nations Lit! also had the privilege of attending Erdrich’s talk at the PDX Book Fest. I’m so excited to read her new book, “The Sentence.” this book is going to stay with me for a long time. 😭

(2.5 stars) this was meh, read it for my summer class and used an audiobook to get through it, wasn’t a big fan of the audiobook and the story didn’t really live up to what the synopsis got me excited for

I liked this book most of the time. Loved the coming of age shenanigans 13 year olds get into. Loved the introspective or Perspective od the Original Americans. It was like a history lesson on displacement, really interesting folklore and a whodunnit mystery that gets solved around the 60% mark all packed into one. The prose was more elegant than a typical airport thriller. The characters were interesting and also more developed. But the story felt to be dragged a lot. Specially after the whodunnit was solved. Also, the main story (the "thriller mystery" part) wasn't exactly interesting. But loved the description about culture, tradition, rituals that took place in the book. I soldiered through just for that. BUT, I've read other way more intriguing novels by Original American authors with more a more compelling story. This felt like The Body (Stephen King) meets the Ojibwe.

Stashed away in a cupboard- that's how my family discovered Louise Erdrich's work. My mom does not know how Erdrich's book "The Last Report" ended up in our home, but we are grateful for it. That book remains incomplete, awaiting my attention when I return to my parents' home. This book I picked up instead, determined to find an Erdrich book I enjoyed. Themes of innocence lost and the larger flaw in the Native Americans' sovereignty status with the United States. A thirteen year old boy seeks answers and eventually revenge for crimes committed against his mother, an innocent victim. I loved the law brought into this novel. The use of law and court cases in books fascinates me. Erdrich weaves in the use of court cases to show the simple crimes that Natives rely on to set precedence. Trigger warning for rape.

We started out on the wrong foot. I was a bit dismayed by the blunt metaphor we find in the book’s very first sentence: ”Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.” Our narrator is Joe Coutts, a thirteen-year-old boy of the Ojibwe tribe in North Dakota. It’s a Sunday morning in the summer of 1988, and he and his father are outside trying to dig out the sprouting seedlings. "They were just seedlings with one or two rigid, healthy leaves. Nevertheless, the stalky shoots had managed to squeeze through knife cracks in the decorative brown shingles covering the cement blocks. They had grown into the unseen wall and it was difficult to pry them loose. My father wiped his palm across his forehead and damned their toughness. I was using a rusted old dandelion fork with a splintered handle; he wielded a long, slim iron fireplace poker that was probably doing more harm than good. As my father prodded away blindly at the places where he sensed the roots might have penetrated, he was surely making convenient holes in the mortar for next year’s seedlings." Because I already knew the basic premise of the book, I found this to be a tad overdone, though I guess you have to have your characters doing something when they first come onto the page. As Sunday starts to drift away, Joe and his father, Antone Bazil Coutts (whom some might remember from Erdrich’s Plague of Doves, which I have yet to read but will soon), begin to worry because Geraldine, mother and wife, has been gone for hours without word. They arrange to get a car to go find her, telling themselves all of the silly things she must be doing, how they’ll laugh about it all later. Massive relief sets in when they are driving down the road and she zips by them in the other lane, heading home. Relief gives way to terror when they finally catch up to her and find that she has been raped and doused in gasoline. She’d just managed to escape. The crime has threatened to destroy the foundation of the Coutts family, and everything Joe and his father do to fix it may just be making it worse — in case that wasn’t clear already. That metaphor aside — in fact, let’s throw it out the window for now because the book is, at this juncture, better than that — all of this develops naturally over the next fifty pages. Geraldine, normally a vivacious, clever, kind, loving wife and mother retreats into her room and into herself. She won’t tell anyone the details, including who did it. She denies she ever went looking for a file. The only thing they know is that the crime happened somewhere near the round house, an old log hexagon used once for rituals, both sacred and profane. Independently, Joe and his father plan how they will achieve justice. This is harder than simply finding out who did it, though. In fact, though presented as a mystery, it is hardly a mysterious; we suspect who committed the atrocity because through side stories we learn about only one potential culprit with motive and madness enough to do this. Well before the book reaches its climax, Erdrich confirms we are right. That’s not a quibble I have with the book because, again, finding him is not the problem. The real trick is prosecuting him, bringing about justice. Though they know the crime was committed near the round house, the round house sits close to three types of land, each in different jurisdiction governed by a different set of laws. Such is the “toothless sovereignty” of the Indian people that if they don’t know the crime was committed on their land they cannot prosecute. The rapist, kidnapper, and potential murderer goes free (though I get that they don’t know where the rape occurred, I am curious about why they could not prosecute for kidnapping and attempted murder, which all took place on Indian territory; does anyone know if this is a hole in the book?). This has been one of many real problems the United States legal system has imposed on the Native Americans. In the back of the book, Erdrich cites a 2009 Amnesty Internation report that found that one in three Native American women are raped; 86% of these crimes are committed by Non-Native American men, most of whom are never prosecuted due to various legal loopholes that have given way to a sense of inevitability and helplessness. The book also touches on the 1823 Supreme Court case that stated that Native Americans could sell their land only to the United States Federal Government (thus keeping the prices low and establishing via dicta the doctrine of discovery); throughout a century spent purposely pushing the Native Americans into debt to the Federal Government, a lot of land was transferred to pay the debts, pushing the people onto reservations with no food. A later story in The Round House takes us back to that time. Again, I found this aspect of the book nicely developed, introducing the deplorable legal precedents that form the foundation (there, by no accident, is that metaphor again!) of Indian law. Bazil Coutts himself is a judge, and he pulls out some of his old cases to study them for legal precedents. Joe looks on with boredom — how can his dad be proud of cases that deal primarily with silly little crimes? – but I found it fascinating. The cases themselves may have mundane facts, but Judge Coutts used these facts to make incremental progress in chipping away at more than a century’s-worth of horrific legal precedent. This portion of the book was interesting, intelligent, and relevant. Sadly, for me anyway, Erdrich fails to really explore this area with any real nuance because she continually moves away time and time again to show Joe’s coming of age. Yes, it adds texture to the novel, and Erdrich is generally great at adding texture, but here it had a dilutive effect and only just stops short of completely washing away everything else. It’s not that Joe’s development shouldn’t be there at all. On the contrary. When we first meet Joe out digging seedlings out of the foundation to the family, er, the home, we see him wishing for some excitement. Years later, when he’s telling this story, Joe looks back with a bit of guilt: “In a vague way, I hoped something was going to happen.” Of course, he didn’t want what actually happened, but that impression forms a part of him. His personal development from that bored child into the successful prosecutor he eventually becomes years later is done well. The distracting bits deal with his friends and other relations. Again, it’s not that these shouldn’t be here (we need to get to know his friends who help him get through this time), but watching the four thirteen year olds fantasize about Star Wars, Star Trek, sex, and beer – for pages and pages at a time – really pulls the reader away from the more pressing, nuanced issues. Does the book really need to be a crime drama and a summertime coming-of-age novel? I don’t think so. The summertime coming-of-age stuff was partially there to show Joe’s own tendencies toward women, but for the most part it isn’t done well enough to serve anything other than a conventional, rote story. Also distracting are the elaborate side stories from other characters. Linda Wishkob, whom you may recognize as the twin in Erdrich’s story “The Years of My Birth” (which I reviewed here), sits down with Joe and Bazil and tells the terrible story of how she was discarded by her white parents and raised by the Wishkob family. It’s a great story (which is why I remember it so well two years after I read it as an independent story). I gripe a lot about novel excerpts being presented as independent short stories. It also doesn’t work to take a fully developed short story, with independent themes, and insert it into a novel with a different rhythm and raison d’etre. It seemed like an afterthought, as central to the story as Linda and the story actually is. Less organic still are the old man Mooshum’s stories. Joe finds himself sharing a room with Mooshum, and each night Mooshum tells a story from the time when the reservation was established and the people were starving. The strange thing here is that Mooshum is asleep! Asleep he manages to go on at length one night and then continue the story, without missing a beat, the next. This story gives Joe the history of the round house and of an old myth that just may explain how the crime committed against his mother relates back generations. I’m not making an argument for strict narrative realism here. I’m fine if Linda Wishkob or Mooshum go on for pages to tell stories in a way we just don’t naturally tell stories. My problem here is that they are so crudely inserted into the book, and that crudeness is further emphasized by the snaking narrative threads in these stories, threads that don’t serve The Round House. To go further, I also don’t need to have all the threads neatly tied together, but in this case so many tangles do not make the book richer. For a few pages The Round House leaves this behind and again focuses on the legal issues making the case impossible to prosecute. Again Basil explains the importance of his legal opinions to Joe, who is beginning to get it: “Everything we do, no matter how trivial, must be crafted keenly.” I remain a devoted fan of Louise Erdrich, and in truth so much of what I admire in her comes out in The Round House, but, due to the failures I’ve mentioned above, this sentence stood out to me. Ultimately The Round House is cobbled together, and the loose shoots coming out of each individual narrative crack and warp the whole thing.

In "The Round House," a 14 year old boy living on an Indian Reservation seeks the perpetrator who violently assaulted his mother. I have mixed feelings for Round House. I enjoyed the character studies in the novel, especially the friendship between Joe and his three buddies. I often laughed out loud at their conversations which revolved around sex, cigarettes, and booze. One particularily funny scene had the boys' ancient great grandmother regaling them with her past escapades, which they sat through in order to be fed. Hilarious. The main story arc regarding the rape of Joe's mother and the grey areas of Tribal Law I found rather contrived. Joe's mother withdraws into her own world after the rape and can't tell the authorities if she was raped on tribal, federal, or private land. The perpetrator, who the victim KNOWS (but will not divulge at first)choose a piece of land specifically for this reason. Ok, you have me so far, but then the author takes you on a convoluted path as to why Joe's mother was the victim. The path includes a barely explained relationship between a young native american girl and the governor of the state, their bastard child, and a odd twin brother/sister, adopbted sibling relationship. Throw in some Native American spiritulaism complete with undefined Native American vocabulary words and legends spanning pages, and I really started to lose interest. Plus, the ultimate conclusion was hurried and disappointing. I also found out this book is part of a larger series involving this same community; perhaps I would have a deeper understanding had a read the prior tales. Recommended only for those who really enjoye legal mysteries and Native AMerican culture.

I had read one Erdrich short story and always meant to try out more of her fiction. This one's a winner. The voice is perfect, the story compelling, the glimpses it gives of life on the reservation (and the mythologies of generations before) rewarding. The book makes a strong (but not preachy, overbearing) case for reform of reservation law enforcement and jurisdiction, a topic I knew nothing about before picking up this book and feel suddenly a little bit invested in -- a testament to how well Erdrich has woven together a good story and a plea for social conscience.

Part coming-of-age, part rape mystery, and most interestingly, part study of tribal jurisdiction, The Round House is a masterful blending of the devastation and destruction sexual assault has on the victim and her family, the intricacies of law that prohibit justice from being done, and the innocence of a 13-year-old boy who cannot stand by as his mother's attacker goes free. Erdrich has written a beautiful novel that is about all of these things. It is a rich, full story that is multi-layered to pull the reader in and keep you engaged. At its core it radiates two important messages: the rape of Native women by non-Native men continues to be a massive problem and "the tangle of laws that hinder prosecution of rape cases on many reservations still exists." They'd built [the Round House] to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth. In The Round House, Joe learns from his dad the details of the case. His father is a tribal judge. The intricacies of the law -- of where the crime occurred, and therefore whose jurisdiction it would be -- ultimately sets the perpetrator free. And as so often happens with men in fiction, the young son takes matters into his own hands when he sees the law and justice system will fail to bring the attacker to account for his crime.

Louise Erdrich has devasted me again with her incredible writing. The Round House is the second book in a loosely connected trilogy which begins with The Plague of Doves and ends with LaRose. All three novels take place on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota and deal with issues of crime and justice. The Round House centers around Geraldine and Antone Bazil Courts, who were introduced in The Plague House, and their son Joe. The story begins when Geraldine is brutally raped and subsequently retreats to her bedroom, unable to eat or interact with the outside world. Bazil, a tribal judge, attempts to identify her attacker while the local police, tribal police, and FBI jostle over jurisdiction, but Geraldine refuses to speak about the attack. The story is told through Joe's eyes as he and his friends decide to investigate on their own, disappointed with law enforcement's lack of progress. This is possibly the best coming of age novel I've ever read. As Joe struggles with the ideas of justice and what's right and wrong, he's also experiencing adolescence and forming his own system of values and shaping his thinking about what it means to be a man. This book also highlights the sexual violence that indigenous women disproportionately experience, most often at the hands of non-indigenous men, and how rarely they see justice. Erdrich is such a talented writer. Her stories are filled with distinct, authentic, unforgettable characters and her prose is beautifully evocative. I will definitely be reading LaRose soon to finish the trilogy, and I can't wait to discover more of her works.