The Round House is not an easy read, given that it begins with the brutal rape of a Native American woman. Geraldine Coutts. She is the wife of a brilliant, well-educated tribal judge who is known for his calm, reasoned, and fair decisions, decisions that make him enemies as well as adherents. Geraldine refuses to identify her attacker or talk about the event, withdrawing to her darkened room.
The book is written in the voice of her son, Joe, who narrates the tale as an adult, many years later. He was thirteen at the time of the attack, and Ms. Erdrich has done a prodigious job of inhabiting the mind of a 13-year-old male. Her ability to express his anger and hurt and confusion, never mind his desperate desire to set things to rights, is dead-on. She also gives us a masterful depiction of a child whose emerging adolescence, bound up as it is in deep friendship for his buddies and enlivened with lust for an older woman named Sonja, is at once confusing and completely believable.
Joe’s determination to solve the crime leads him into dangerous territory. His mother’s refusal to speak about what happened to her baffles and distresses him, and he sets out on his own to track down the truth. He is an exceptionally bright boy, and he has three friends who help him in his detective work. The depiction of this tight little band will find instant recognition with anyone who has ever reared a boy or two, touching as it does on everything from ordinary friskiness to more serious mischief to outright tragedy.
It is not easy to describe the brilliance with which Erdrich balances humor and anxiety and terrible truths, but somehow she manages to make us smile in the midst of all the angst. Her portrayals of Joe’s many relationships — from old Mooshum, his grandfather, to an unwanted, "magnetically ugly" woman named Linda who was abandoned by her white birth mother and adopted by a Native American couple, to his best friend, Cappy — all ring true even as they drive forward this compelling novel.
The truth of the rape (and of an accompanying crime) eventually does come out, and Joe’s mother is somewhat restored to her old life. That truth, however, brings with it an accompanying, new tragedy, one which marks Joe deeply, and changes forever the child’s relationship to his world.
©2013 Julia Sneden for SeniorWomen.com
National Book Foundation interview with Ms. Erdich: - Interview >
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