Book by book, over the past three decades, Louise Erdrich has built one of the most moving and engrossing collections of novels in American literature. Few writers have done as much to help modern readers consider the position of Native Americans within a national culture that has denigrated, ignored and romanticized them. And yet her books never feel like a whip for right-thinking people to lash themselves with for the ill treatment of Indians. In rich, loosely linked stories about Native and European families in and around the fictional town of Argus, N.D., she explores our conflicted desires to belong and exclude, desires that can motivate any of us — Native or immigrant — toward acts of devotion or cruelty.
Crimes sit at the center of some of Erdrich’s most powerful stories. She’s particularly interested in the trail of blood left through the lives of survivors and ancestors. The previous novel in her North Dakota cycle, the luxuriously complex “Plague of Doves,” which was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize, followed the reverberations of a lynching near the Ojibwe reservation in 1911.
This new novel, “The Round House,” uses some of the characters from that earlier work, but it focuses more tightly on the immediate aftereffects of a vicious attack in 1988.
The story opens on a Sunday afternoon when 13-year-old Joe starts to wonder where his mother is. He’s a happy, good-natured kid, beloved by his parents and sensitive to their routines. “Women don’t realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits,” Joe says. “Our pulse is set to theirs, and as always on a weekend afternoon we were waiting for my mother to start us ticking away on the evening.”
Soon, they find her sitting in the car in the driveway, “staring blindly ahead.” She’s covered in blood and reeks of gasoline. Joe’s father has to pry her fingers off the steering wheel so they can rush her to the hospital. In the horrible hours that follow, they learn she was beaten and raped near the round house, a structure used for their sacred ceremonies.
But exactly what happened remains as mysterious as who committed the crime. Joe’s mother, a tribal enrollment specialist, won’t name her attacker, and Joe’s father, a tribal judge, knows that the precise location of the assault will leave her case hanging in legal limbo between state and tribal jurisdictions. The question of who is and who isn’t an Indian gradually becomes the heart of the matter as the crime gets caught in the tangled branches of family and retribution, “the gut kick of our history.”
Everything in Erdrich’s stories rises up from the soil of history, but to a 13-year-old boy, history seems irrelevant. He just sees his mother falling into catatonic depression and knows he has to save her. Caught between childhood and adulthood, Joe is old enough to understand what has been done to her but not old enough to be trusted with the details. He begs to be included but senses that information about the assault and his mother’s injuries are “a poison” in his young mind.
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