The Round House by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “The sentence was to endure” Louise Erdrich's The Round House (2012) is narrated by Joe (nicknamed Oops because he was his parents’ accident) Coutts, who many years later as a married lawyer (?) is recalling the summer of 1988 when he had just turned thirteen. Joe and his family were members of the Ojibwe (Anishinabe) tribe living then on the Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota. Joe’s father Bazil was a judge, his mother Geraldine a tribal enrollment specialist. The novel opens with Joe and father finding Geraldine covered in blood and vomit and smelling like gasoline. She has been raped and nearly immolated. But because she won’t reveal who did it or why, Joe takes it upon himself to find the perpetrator so as to bring him to justice of one kind or another. Joe has suspects, for instance a white man from a slimy family involved in one of his father’s court cases or the new white Catholic priest who’s a scarred veteran proficient at shooting gophers. Meanwhile, his mother becomes spider-like in her emaciation and isolates herself from her family. Despite, or perhaps because of, the appalling nature of the brutal rape and its tragic effects on Joe’s mother and his family, the novel is often very funny, Erdrich writing comical and quirky scenes, details, and asides through Joe’s narratorial voice, giving him and the reader plenty of chuckling or smiling release valves to ease sympathy and outrage. There are eccentric characters, like Joe’s grandfather Mooshum and Linda Lark. There are things like the account of the Star Trek Next Generation characters liked (Worf, Data, Deanna Troi) and disliked (Riker, Wesley) by Joe and his friends; the time when a self-important medicine man in training unwittingly dumped a lot of hot pepper herbs on the heated stones in a sweat lodge; the description of his friends’ idiosyncratic bicycles; his thirteen-year-old crush on his ex-stripper aunt’s breasts. Lines like, “There are Indian grandmas who get too much church and Indian grandmas where the church doesn’t take and who are let loose in their old age to shock the young.” Even when he and his friends are scouring the woods around the Round House (an abandoned symbolically female site for traditional rituals) for clues that his mother’s attacker might have left behind, an intensely serious activity, Joe makes us smile via a legion of hungry ticks and his friend’s comical story about being accidentally flea bombed inside his house when he was four. There is a harrowing scene where Joe notices his mother’s vertebrae sticking out through her nightgown, her shoulder blades like knives, her complexion pasty, her eyes darkly circled, her hair lank and greasy, and her vitality dim, and then announces to her that he’ll find and burn her attacker, only to have her briefly assume her former mother persona’s authority to tell him that he will not cause her more fear, will not search for her attacker, and will not ask her questions, and then he tries to teach their wolf-dog Pearl how to fetch, only to have her intimidatingly refuse, closing her teeth on his wrist as if to snap his bones, leading Joe to say with humorous understatement, “So you don’t play fetch, I see that now.” Erdrich has an eye and an ear for how adolescent boys talk, act, feel, think: the teasing, boasting, joking, supporting, and rough housing; the randy bawdy hungry reckless behavior. It all feels real and adds layers of comedy and pathos to the story. Joe and his buddies (Cappy, Angus, and Zach) speculate on whether it’s better to have a penis looking like Darth Vader or the evil hooded Emperor, get side-tracked when looking for evidence by the lucky find of a couple of cold sixpacks, make Indian jokes, tease each other, sneak cigarettes, are embarrassed by lewd remarks from grandmothers, and enjoy each other’s company. When Joe gets his friends to help him try to find and nail his mother’s attacker, the book almost gets a Stand by Me vibe (though less sentimental). Throughout, Erdrich writes plenty of reservation life details about politics, policing, law, health care, enrollment, adoption, food, families, groceries, parties, powwows, sweat lodges, Catholicism, history, pronunciation of d instead of th, and more, as well as plenty of references to things like “the gut-kick of our history” experienced by all Native Americans by which, for instance, the USA (from the founding fathers and early Supreme Court on) eagerly took their land by any means devisable, or by which their people were lynched, or by which the federal government enacted outrageous laws interfering with their own legal systems and so on. Indeed, much of the book centers on the question of tribal autonomy (or lack thereof) when it comes to legal matters and criminal cases. “They’d built that place [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 addition to Star Trek: The Next Generation, Erdrich also writes in plenty of vintage popular culture references to the likes of Lord of the Rings, Dune, Star Wars, Alien, and TV action games. She does much vivid and witty writing, like “Sour turnips and tomatoes, beets and corn, scorched garlic, unknown meat, and an onion gone bad, the concoction gave off a penetrating reek,” or like he “labored with incremental ferocity. . . ant-like.” The novel becomes bleak towards the end, shedding humor in favor of tragedy and loss and sudden aging, and I have to think more about what I think of the abrupt conclusion: is it perversely unfulfilling or bracingly honest? It is like the cold breath of a windigo winter wind: “We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just kept going.” I am glad to have read the novel and do recommend it as a necessary book for anyone interested in historical and contemporary Native American life, but. . . I prefer Erdrich’s Love Medicine or Birchbark House books. The audiobook reader Gary Farmer is just right. View all my reviews
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