Your people were brought together by us buffalo once. You knew how to hunt and use us. Your clans gave you laws. You had many rules by which you operated. Rules that respected us and forced you to work together. Now we are gone, but as you have once sheltered in my body, so now you understand. The round house will be my body, the poles my ribs, the fire my heart. It will be the body of your mother and it must be respected the same way. As the mother is intent on her baby's life, so your people should think of their children.
When Joe Coutts his thirteen, his mother is attacked and raped. In the aftermath of the crime, she becomes skittish and withdrawn, a ghost of her former self. Joe's father, a tribal judge, sets out to find the perpetrator, scouring over the files of the people who have appeared in his court. Joe is allowed, sometimes, to share in his father's search, but for the most part he must look on from the outside, following his own suspicions, and perhaps even taking justice into his own hands. Though Joe's father tries to conceal it, suspicion soon falls on Linden Lark, a malicious white man who works for North Dakota's governor. There's a who, a what, and a why, but the where is what makes things hairy: Joe's mother was blindfolded, and can't remember where exactly the crime occurred, though she knows it's on the grounds of the round house the Ojibwe use for traditional purposes. These grounds are crossed by ornate lines of ownership--reservation land, federal land, private land--and without knowing the precise spot, no one know whose jurisdiction might be invoked to bring Lark to justice.
The Round House suggests at first it will be a kind of mystery novel, in which the reader is invited to follow along as Joe puts clue to clue. But, despite a false start or two, suspicion falls immediately on Linden, a man Erdrich paints as utterly vicious and amoral. The jurisdiction, instead, is the mystery, and it's an intractable one. The Round House presents a version of a story that plays out time and time again on reservations: when non-Natives commit violent crimes against Natives, tribal jurisdiction is powerless to pursue them, and state and federal lawmakers simply don't care. When Joe decides to punish Linden himself, he cuts through the red tape that protects violent rapists. And if we expect Joe to think better, or to disavow vigilantism in the end, we are sorely disappointed: there's no sense of regret or remorse here, because Joe's solution is the only one by which true justice can be done.
Talking in his sleep, Joe's grandfather tells the story of how Nanapush, the lustful, ancient trickster of many of Erdrich's other novels, built the round house on the instructions of the buffalo. The house is a symbol of the buffalo, whose hide and bones protected Nanapush in a snowstorm, and a symbol also of the mother, inside of whom we grow and who surrounds and protects us. When Linden rapes Joe's mother Geraldine, the violation is also a violation of Ojibwe sovereignty and memory, something that is depicted in The Round House as explicitly maternal. The round house is utterly unlike the land on which it sits: its value and ownership are clear and unambiguous. Perhaps this is why Linden chooses it to be the site of his violence.
There's another angle to Linden's story, which is rather convoluted: at birth, Linden's twin sister was left by his mother to die because of a birth defect. But instead she was adopted by a Native janitor, and enrolled as Ojibwe. Linda's story is an inversion of a more familiar one: Linden is helping the governor adopt a Native baby away from her mother. (It's this that seems to have sparked his ire against Joe's mom, a social worker.) Linden and Linda are part of the novel's interest in doubles, doppelgangers, wendigos, but the story also adds to the sense that The Round House is more relevant than ever. The questions of tribal jurisdiction are reflected in the recent McGirt decision, which asserted tribal jurisdiction over a huge section of Oklahoma. And the two adoptions presage a case currently in front of the Supreme Court that may strike down the Indian Child Welfare Act, meant to prevent the kind of child-snatching that Linden--dark father, evil twin--wants to perpetrate.
The Round House is one of Erdrich's straighter novels. Supernatural elements are few--though I enjoyed Joe's grandmother telling Nanapush's story in his sleep--and there's little of the sense of jubilant excess that you find in many of her other novels. But it stands among the best of her work in its depiction of cruelty and grief. And it isn't just limited to Lark: the moment where Joe himself blackmails his (unrelated) aunt to watch her strip is one of her more disconcerting moments. The aunt, Sonja, accuses him of being another vicious creep, another Linden perhaps, a wendigo who consumes human flesh. And the wendigo can take the form of anyone.
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