The Round House by Louise Erdrich (review)

Louise Erdrich manages to merge both old and new in her most recent novel, The Round House. Like many of Erdrich’s works, The Round House revolves around a Chippewa family living on a reservation in North Dakota. Yet, in spite of similar themes and the reappearance of characters found in several of Erdrich’s works, she does break new ground in The Round House by taking a more political tone and highlighting historic legal difficulties faced by the Chippewa due to laws and policies created by the U.S. government.

In The Round House Erdrich skillfully presents a bildungsroman, opening her novel with her newly thirteen year old protagonist, Joe Coutts, lamenting his milquetoast life and hoping for some excitement, something different. Joe gets his wish as his life is forever changed after a brutal attack on his mother. Erdrich takes the reader along as Joe is forced into adulthood by needing to become self-reliant as both his parents lock themselves away: his mother emotionally shutting down and locking herself in her bedroom and his father, the tribal judge, pouring himself into his court cases and law books in an attempt to make sense of the heinous crime. Joe becomes a sounding board for his father, Bazil, who feels guilt and trepidation subjecting his son to this task as they scour court cases in an attempt to put together the pieces of the attack that has left their wife and mother silent and sealed away in her bedroom. Frustrated with the limitations and the slow movement of a legal process, Joe independently investigates his mother’s attack. Erdrich tackles the problematic situation of jurisdiction in her novel and the history of difficulties that Native Americans faced in their attempts to get justice through the U.S. legal system. She highlights the difficulty and the breakdown of the investigation due to uncertainty about whether the matter is the legal jurisdiction of the tribal police, state police, or federal government. By emphasizing the problem of attaining justice in the face of a brutal attack, Erdrich reiterates the long standing argument that Indians have repeatedly been the victim of federal law.

Those familiar with Erdrich’s work may find comfort in the appearance of characters from her other novels in The Round House, which brings about a sense of continuity. At the midpoint of the novel Erdrich resurrects her most famous storyteller, Nanapush, through the dreams of Mooshum. Although it may appear that Nanapush’s appearance in The Round House is just an attempt by the author to reintroduce her arguably most popular protagonist, Nanapush’s presence in the story serves as a lynchpin, connecting the tribal history Erdrich wants to establish by providing historic background to the Round House and thereby allowing the story to move forward. Just as Nanapush’s resurrection in The Round House is more significant than it appears on the surface, so is Erdrich’s crafting of Mooshum. Mooshum is important since his portrayal displays underlying problems that elders in the Native American community face. In his youth, Mooshum was widely respected for his intelligence and frequently sought out as council. Now as an old man, he is treated as a child and his requests and complaints are dismissed as he is considered too old to know what’s good for him. His daughter Clemence perpetually gives him strong root tea to drink for his health instead of the whiskey he would prefer. Mooshum responds by calling the tea “bunny piss” or “swamp tea” and retaliates by urinating in the sink.

As in many of her other novels, The Round House is fraught with sexual humor. Erdrich attempts to shock her audience with descriptions of Joe and his friends skinny dipping, comparing penis sizes, as well as having a tick attach to one of the boy’s scrotum, giving him the appearance of having three testicles. Erdrich then digresses into a story that one of the other boys retells about his grandmother having sex with a three testicled man and her recollection...