On a Sunday evening in May 1988, three policemen walk into a small-town emergency ward to take a statement from the same woman. One is a state trooper, one works for the town, one for the tribal police. Judge Bazil Coutts has asked all three to come, because nobody yet knows whether his wife was attacked on state land or tribal land, or whether the man who did it was Native or white, and each answer hands the case to a different authority. His thirteen-year-old son, Joe, asks which police will handle it. His father’s one-word reply is the whole problem. The Round House by Louise Erdrich is a crime novel in which the crime is never in doubt. What is in doubt is whether the law is allowed to touch it.

How It Works

Geraldine Coutts, an enrollment specialist for the tribe, comes home bleeding and smelling of gasoline. She has been raped and nearly killed, and for weeks afterwards she will not leave her bedroom or say what happened. Joe narrates. He is the only child of older parents on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota, a boy who spends his summer on a bike with three friends and his evenings reading his father’s battered copy of Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law.

The investigation runs on two tracks. Bazil carries a stack of old case files home from tribal court, convinced that a grudge from one of his rulings explains the attack, and Joe sits beside him in the study reading them. Erdrich prints several of those judgments in full, so a whole chapter is laid out as court opinions: washers worth fifteen cents, a surcharge at a gas station, a death after a sacred ceremony. Meanwhile, in the half of The Round House by Louise Erdrich that belongs to the boys, Joe and his friends go to the old round house by the lake, where the attack began, and find what the police missed, starting with a gas can sunk in the water.

What the Round House Is Really About

The mystery is real, and it resolves. But the novel’s true subject is the trap underneath it. Three kinds of land meet near the round house, and the exact spot of the attack decides who can prosecute. Even when a suspect emerges, the tribe cannot try him if he is not Native, a limit set by a 1978 Supreme Court ruling that stripped tribal courts of criminal jurisdiction over non-Natives. Bazil explains this to Joe in one of the best scenes in the book, stacking knives and forks on a rotten casserole to show how bad precedents sit at the base of everything built on top of them.

That is why The Round House by Louise Erdrich works as a coming-of-age story rather than a procedural. Joe learns, in a single summer, that his father’s power is real but small, that the system was built with a hole in it, and that a boy might be tempted to fill the hole himself. The title also earns its double meaning: the building is a crime scene and, in the stories Joe hears that summer, a place made for doing justice properly.

What works

• Bazil Coutts. A quiet, slightly clumsy man who signs his opinions in indigo fountain pen and writes careful judgments for a future he will never see. His slow collapse, and his stubborn decency, give the book its moral weight.
• The case files. Ruling after ruling about petty theft and land boundaries shows what tribal sovereignty looks like day to day, and Joe’s disappointment at how small it all is turns out to be the point.
• Linda Wishkob. A postal clerk whose own story, the emotional high point of The Round House by Louise Erdrich, told across one long chapter, is a novella in itself and one of the finest things Erdrich has written.
• The comedy. A spying mission at the young priest’s house goes wrong in the most memorable way, and the boys end up watching Alien through his window. Erdrich is very funny, and the laughter keeps the grief bearable.
• The Star Trek frame. Most chapter titles are borrowed from The Next Generation episodes, and the boys use the show as a code. It dates the book precisely and makes them feel like real thirteen-year-olds.

Where It Gives Ground

• The digressions. The Round House by Louise Erdrich is long, and dinner-table monologues and a church youth-camp episode are enjoyable on their own terms but stall the main line at the point where tension should be climbing.
• Convenient turns. One important discovery depends on Joe being in exactly the right spot at the right moment, and another key encounter comes by sheer chance. The coincidences are noticeable in a book otherwise so careful about cause and effect.
• Joe’s gaze. His crush on his uncle’s partner is written with a frankness that is honest about a thirteen-year-old’s body, and also lingers. In a novel about sexual violence, some readers will find it hard to sit with.

Read These Next

If The Round House by Louise Erdrich leaves you wanting more books about justice that arrives late or not at all, try these.

1. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, the obvious ancestor: a lawyer father, a child watching the courts fail, a rape case at the centre.
2. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange, for a multigenerational Native family carrying what the government did to it.
3. Big Chief by Jon Hickey, reservation politics and a tribal election, written with the same eye for local power.
4. Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann, the nonfiction account of crimes against the Osage that the authorities would not solve.

About Louise Erdrich and Some Round House Trivia

Louise Erdrich was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954 and is an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians. Her North Dakota novels form one connected world, and The Round House by Louise Erdrich is the middle book of a loose trilogy about justice. It stands alone, but the order is The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012) and LaRose (2016). Her most recent novel, The Mighty Red, moves to the sugar-beet farms of the Red River Valley.

• She was in Dartmouth’s first class to admit women, in 1972.
• Her debut, Love Medicine (1984), won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
• HarperCollins published this novel on 2 October 2012; it won the National Book Award for Fiction that November.
• She wrote much of it while being treated for cancer.
• The Night Watchman won her the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2021, and she runs Birchbark Books, an independent shop in Minneapolis.

Worth Your Shelf

There is no Thanksgiving in this book: it runs from May to late August. But much of it happens at the family table, or in the absence of one, and the scene where Bazil deliberately cooks a dreadful stew to coax his wife back downstairs says more about holding a family together than any holiday novel. The Round House by Louise Erdrich is baggy in places and leans on luck at least twice. It is also angry, generous and very funny, and it explains a real injustice more clearly than most nonfiction manages. The structure was built to fail Geraldine Coutts. Erdrich makes sure you see every crack in it.