The Round House by Louise Erdrich

The background of the story is very familiar to the author and her readers—it takes place on a North Dakota reservation in the not too distant past. The most consistent elements of Louise Erdrich’s fiction for me over time has been her ability to convey the unique effects that the treatment of Native Americans in the United States has had on them over the generations since the Civil War.  It has been over a 100 years, but the legacy of that era lingers on, and it is especially significant for those who live on the reservation, who are choosing, for whatever reason, to live away from both mainstream America as well as urban America.   We are resistant to confront the consequences of our past—maybe that is true of every nation—and perhaps fiction makes that confrontation more palatable.  In any case, this is an excellent installment into Ms. Erdrich’s body of work—and it recently received the National Book Award, so I am not alone in thinking that.

In this tale, thirteen year old Joe is the one telling the story, and while it includes a lot of things that you would expect of Erdrich in the way of details about everyday lives on a tribal reservation, the main event in the book is the brutal rape of Joe’s mother.  The rape is an act of revenge, and the story unfolds to reveal why retribution that is taken out of the hide of another can be far more effective than directly damaging the hated person—it can affect everyone for years to come.  The book doesn’t play this up, but it is not possible for tribal police to prosecute white people who perpetrate crimes on reservations.  There is a substantially higher risk of being raped if you are a Native American, and over 80% of rapes on reservations are perpetrated by serial rapists.  They are too complicated to prosecute, and the people who suffer are not the people who can mete out justice, which is very wrong.  The Violence Against Women Act would close that loop hole, but it was voted down by House Republicans.  So the situation described in this book still exists.  The family gets revenge, but at a cost, and the law is something that really needs to be fixed.  This book is an excellent story that is spun around this real life problem.