Set on a reservation in North Dakota, the 13-year-old protagonist and son of a reservation judge, Joe Coutts, sees his innocent childhood come to an end when his mother Geraldine comes home from an errand bloody and mutely terrified. The plot slowly unfolds as Joe's mother, the victim of a brutal rape and attempted double murder, takes to her bed and refuses to identify her attacker, who is assumed to be white.
In addition, Geraldine only identifies that the scene of the crime occurred near the sacred round house. The uncertain location and white suspect make prosecution almost impossible. As his mother continues to shrink deeper into herself, Joe and his friends take matters into their own hands and seek vengeance for the act of hate that has torn his family apart.
"The Round House" is an extension of Erdrich's fictional Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, which unmistakably mirrors William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County with its web of interrelated characters and histories. Joe's father, the honorable judge Antone Bazil Coutts, and elderly grandfather Mooshum appear in one of Erdrich's earlier novels, "The Plague of Doves" a Pulitzer Prize finalist that contains similar themes of vigilante justice within a reservation community.
In "The Round House," Erdrich effectively uses her adolescent protagonist who straddles his reservation and the outside white world to properly cater to a variety of readers. The ancient native myths, which are interspersed with the modern cross-culturalism of the reservation, are not overwhelming or archaic, but instead are strongly tied to the novel's current setting.
Erdrich interweaves biting and memorable tidbits of everyday life to help bolster a real and holistic portrayal of reservation life. The outdated law handbook, for instance, kept dusty and unopened, is a symbolic, mocking tribute to an era of particularly violent Native American discrimination.
The protagonist Joe serves a similar purpose, as his youthful and innocent normalcy persists despite his increasingly dark and frustrating situation. Through Joe, Erdrich is once again able to demonstrate the same incredible power of the everyday that strengthens her narrator. Joe is the most developed and complex character of the novel: lovable yet frustrating, insightful yet at times mind-numbingly ignorant.
Erdrich's greatest power, however, is the many colorful minor characters in the novel. Like the everyday details that strengthen "The Round House," these minor characters give life to the story. Memorable minor characters include Linda, the sister of Geraldine's rapist, who continues to bring the family her famous banana bread in a search for acceptance and forgiveness; the unstoppable Grandma Thunder, who enjoys shocking her grandson and his friends with her sexual knowledge of the male elders and the medicinal effects of red peppers; and the lovable and good-natured best friend Cappy, whose unshakable support and sacrifice is one of the most outstanding aspects of the entire novel.
Erdrich's mastery of the minor, however, seems to lose something in translation when magnified to fit the more prominent characters. I found Geraldine to be shallowly constructed and unsympathetic, a difficult feat considering her role as a devastated rape victim. Her state of bedridden catatonia was almost more dynamic than the rest of her participation in the plot development.
Antone Bazil also falls flat after a confrontation with his son in which he explains to Joe that his seemingly "boring" legislative job was a sacrifice to establish however excruciatingly a precedent for the future native jurisdiction on reservations.
Although the emotionally charged, unexpected ending attempts to save what otherwise would have been an obviously faltering conclusion, Erdrich cannot quite conceal her omission of many conclusions that I felt entitled to as a reader. But, despite its somewhat deflated ending, Erdrich directly addresses the modern legislative issues that reservations are facing today. She also paints a colorful, yet real, depiction of native life through the eyes of innocent boyhood alongside a deep philosophical questioning of the ethics of personal justice and loyalty. I look forward to seeing what other complex and purposeful narratives might emerge from this North Dakota reservation that so strongly captivated me.
