Review: The Round House

The Round House by Louise Erdrich
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I probably read this one a bit too quickly to get everything out of it, but I was fortunate to be guided by the criticism of my student. (Thanks Emily.) As part of a senior honors project, she’s reviewing the book as a potential contemporary work that she could share with her future students.

Emily’s thesis is that this is ultimately a novel about justice, and I’m glad to find my experience of the book confirming that. Joe is a boy, only 13, who has to grapple with how to find justice for his mother, his father and himself after a man rapes his mother. On the one hand, it ought to fall to the American courts to do that. On the other, because there is a gap between that court justice and the power of tribal law, the rapist escapes.

That fundamental clash is exacerbated by the fact that Joe’s father is a Native-American judge. He ought to be able to see justice done, but he’s growing old as the novel moves along, and he finds the law is powerless before a sociopath who’s plotted his crimes carefully. Meanwhile, Joe’s old grandfather tells him stories of Indian justice, of the way tribes dealt with “windigos” who threatened it.

In a [SPOILER] Joe eventually kills the rapist with the help of a friend, also 13. They succeed and recognize the justness of their actions, but there’s a final, troubling moment: the other boy, who’s fired the fatal shot, is killed in a car accident that pertains to a sub-plot around his love for a girl who’s moved away. It’s as if, in the end, we see a third strand of justice, a cosmic, karmic sort.

I’ll leave it to Emily to decide how appropriate this is for her intended audience. There’s perhaps more YA intent to it than I especially love in my own readings, but I think – as Emily shows – there’s also some abiding substance to it.

It’s been years since I got to Love Medicine. Maybe it’s time to get back to that.


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