The Round House: A Novel (P.S.)
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels
Winner of the National Book Award • Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book
From one of the most revered novelists of our time, an exquisitely told story of a boy on the cusp of manhood who seeks justice and understanding in the wake of a terrible crime that upends and forever transforms his family.
One Sunday in the spring of 1988, a woman living on a reservation in North Dakota is attacked. The details of the crime are slow to surface because Geraldine Coutts is traumatized and reluctant to relive or reveal what happened, either to the police or to her husband, Bazil, and thirteen-year-old son, Joe. In one day, Joe's life is irrevocably transformed. He tries to heal his mother, but she will not leave her bed and slips into an abyss of solitude. Increasingly alone, Joe finds himself thrust prematurely into an adult world for which he is ill prepared.
While his father, a tribal judge, endeavors to wrest justice from a situation that defies his efforts, Joe becomes frustrated with the official investigation and sets out with his trusted friends, Cappy, Zack, and Angus, to get some answers of his own. Their quest takes them first to the Round House, a sacred space and place of worship for the Ojibwe. And this is only the beginning.
The Round House is a page-turning masterpiece—at once a powerful coming-of-age story, a mystery, and a tender, moving novel of family, history, and culture.
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Community Reviews
Happy endings are expected in romance novels, and because this isn't one, prospective readers will need to adjust their definition of a happy ending. A very well-written account of the prevalence of rape culture and femicide on both Native American Reservations and across the Plains states. In addition, this one requires an immediate shift in perspective regarding when and where vigilante justice is not only morally acceptable but mandatory.
I bought this assuming it would be an instruction manual for roundhouse kicks. Boy was I fooled!
I'm just kidding. I've read two Erdrich novels before and like both quite a bit (Tracks and Love Medicine).
I really knew very little about the plot of this one going into it. If you are disturbed by violence against women, you may want to skip it. But the novel is quite a good story - and Erdrich's prose is very readable. I would call it a bit of a page turner except that it's more that the pages are easy to turn throughout and about 80% of the time you are eager to do so. Unfortunately, about 20% of the time I found Erdrich's digressions to be frustrating and boring. I really enjoyed when they were focused on tribal history, tribal law, and Sonja's past, because those things have direct thematic relevance to the main plot. However, I could do without spending an entire paragraph on the making of pickle and peanut butter sandwiches. I could do without spending an entire page of describing the poor grocery shopping know how of the main character and his dad. There's just a fair bit of 'slice of life' type material here that was distracting from the main plot and the main ideas.
The story also occasionally grew frustrating because it is told through the eyes of a 13 year old. He just acts in immature ways that detract from the serious tone of the rest of the novel, and the "kid doing grown up things because he doesn't trust the grown ups to do them" trope is just really over used. It felt out of place in a book clearly meant for adults.
She also had the priest on the reservation doing some very unpriestly things. I was brought up Catholic, though I am now an atheist. I'm certainly aware of the sexual abuse scandals. Priests over the centuries have been vain, greedy, lustful, etc. - I would not find any of that unbelievable. But to have a priest kicking children? Or chasing them through the streets? It doesn't match the type of person who goes into priesthood, let alone the type of person that can make it through seminary. At least not anytime in the last 50 or 100 years. The jesuits aren't what they were any more.
Finally I will just say that the motivations of the villain were a bit too on the nose and under dramatized.
Still good. But just not the sort of masterpiece I would expect from Erdrich or from a National Book Award Winner.
I'm just kidding. I've read two Erdrich novels before and like both quite a bit (Tracks and Love Medicine).
I really knew very little about the plot of this one going into it. If you are disturbed by violence against women, you may want to skip it. But the novel is quite a good story - and Erdrich's prose is very readable. I would call it a bit of a page turner except that it's more that the pages are easy to turn throughout and about 80% of the time you are eager to do so. Unfortunately, about 20% of the time I found Erdrich's digressions to be frustrating and boring. I really enjoyed when they were focused on tribal history, tribal law, and Sonja's past, because those things have direct thematic relevance to the main plot. However, I could do without spending an entire paragraph on the making of pickle and peanut butter sandwiches. I could do without spending an entire page of describing the poor grocery shopping know how of the main character and his dad. There's just a fair bit of 'slice of life' type material here that was distracting from the main plot and the main ideas.
The story also occasionally grew frustrating because it is told through the eyes of a 13 year old. He just acts in immature ways that detract from the serious tone of the rest of the novel, and the "kid doing grown up things because he doesn't trust the grown ups to do them" trope is just really over used. It felt out of place in a book clearly meant for adults.
She also had the priest on the reservation doing some very unpriestly things. I was brought up Catholic, though I am now an atheist. I'm certainly aware of the sexual abuse scandals. Priests over the centuries have been vain, greedy, lustful, etc. - I would not find any of that unbelievable. But to have a priest kicking children? Or chasing them through the streets? It doesn't match the type of person who goes into priesthood, let alone the type of person that can make it through seminary. At least not anytime in the last 50 or 100 years. The jesuits aren't what they were any more.
Finally I will just say that the motivations of the villain were a bit too on the nose and under dramatized.
Still good. But just not the sort of masterpiece I would expect from Erdrich or from a National Book Award Winner.
On a reservation in North Dakota, a woman is brutally raped and beaten and nearly killed, but escapes her attacker. What follows throughout this story is a sorting-out, a coming-to-terms, and a desire for justice.
The story is narrated by Joe Coutts, a courageous thirteen-year-old Ojibwe boy living on the reservation. His family is “wealthy” by reservation standards, with a nice, but modest, home and plenty to eat. His father Antone is a tribal judge, and his mother Geraldine is something of a tribal genealogist-- it’s her job to keep track of family lines and name changes and the like.
Geraldine is the woman raped at the beginning of the story, and her son Joe must deal with the feelings this rouses in him, and must attempt, along with his father, to repair their fractured family.
The extended family consists of Geraldine's sister Clemence, who lives nearby with their father Mooshum (Joe's grandfather), and her husband Edward. Also Geraldine and Clemence's brother Whitey lives on the reservation, and along with ex-stripper Sonja he runs a gas station on the reservation.
Young Joe has the emotional support of his group of friends. Cappy Lafournais is his loyal best friend, and like a brother to him. Zack and cousin Angus round out the group (Angus lives in abject poverty on the res, and it isn't uncommon to see him sporting a black eye or bruised cheek.)
This story shines a spotlight on the inability to prosecute many crimes committed against Native Americans, due to the convoluted maze of laws in regard to Natives, reservation grounds vs. non-reservation property, and who is even considered to be Native American (which has turned into a complicated formula of what percent you are this or that.)
One thing I had difficulty with at times is the author's writing style. At times it is very clipped and staccato, which is always a bit of a put-off for me. And the dialogue doesn’t use quotations, which I always find a bit confusing, as it makes it difficult for me to discern dialogue from thought from narrative. But she definitely has a way with words, and at times I felt my mind say, "Oh!" at the way she expressed something.
Overall I found it to be a powerful story, original and unembellished.
My final word: Part mystery and part family drama, it’s a tragic story, rife with poverty, abuse, alcoholism, death. But overshadowing it all is a sense of hope, of a people who hold a fragile grasp on all of the good that life has to offer, who suck the marrow from life. There is hope in this young boy Joe.
The story is narrated by Joe Coutts, a courageous thirteen-year-old Ojibwe boy living on the reservation. His family is “wealthy” by reservation standards, with a nice, but modest, home and plenty to eat. His father Antone is a tribal judge, and his mother Geraldine is something of a tribal genealogist-- it’s her job to keep track of family lines and name changes and the like.
Geraldine is the woman raped at the beginning of the story, and her son Joe must deal with the feelings this rouses in him, and must attempt, along with his father, to repair their fractured family.
The extended family consists of Geraldine's sister Clemence, who lives nearby with their father Mooshum (Joe's grandfather), and her husband Edward. Also Geraldine and Clemence's brother Whitey lives on the reservation, and along with ex-stripper Sonja he runs a gas station on the reservation.
Young Joe has the emotional support of his group of friends. Cappy Lafournais is his loyal best friend, and like a brother to him. Zack and cousin Angus round out the group (Angus lives in abject poverty on the res, and it isn't uncommon to see him sporting a black eye or bruised cheek.)
This story shines a spotlight on the inability to prosecute many crimes committed against Native Americans, due to the convoluted maze of laws in regard to Natives, reservation grounds vs. non-reservation property, and who is even considered to be Native American (which has turned into a complicated formula of what percent you are this or that.)
One thing I had difficulty with at times is the author's writing style. At times it is very clipped and staccato, which is always a bit of a put-off for me. And the dialogue doesn’t use quotations, which I always find a bit confusing, as it makes it difficult for me to discern dialogue from thought from narrative. But she definitely has a way with words, and at times I felt my mind say, "Oh!" at the way she expressed something.
Overall I found it to be a powerful story, original and unembellished.
My final word: Part mystery and part family drama, it’s a tragic story, rife with poverty, abuse, alcoholism, death. But overshadowing it all is a sense of hope, of a people who hold a fragile grasp on all of the good that life has to offer, who suck the marrow from life. There is hope in this young boy Joe.
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