The Round House (novel)
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| Author | Louise Erdrich |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Political |
| Publisher | Harper |
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Publication date
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2 October 2012 |
| Media type | Print (hardcover) |
| Pages | 336 (hardcover edition) |
| ISBN | |
| OCLC | 778314690 |
The Round House is a novel by Louise Erdrich first published in 2012. It is her 14th novel. Some critics considered it a thematic sequel to Erdrich's 2008 novel The Plague of Doves due to its themes of revenge. Like most of Erdrich's other works it is set on an unnamed Indian reservation in North Dakota.
It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2012.
In North Dakota in the spring of 1988, 13 year-old Ojibwe Joe Coutts, the only son of aging parents, learns that his mother, Geraldine, has been brutally raped. At the hospital his father Bazil, a tribal judge on the reservation, quickly enlists the county, federal, and tribal police to take statements from his wife. Geraldine was raped near the round house, a spiritual place on reservation land that is surrounded by land under multiple jurisdictions. Joe and his friends go to the round house to try to find evidence that the police might have missed. On this mission Joe locates an empty gas can that had been tossed into the lake at the bottom of the hill.
Geraldine falls into a deep depression after the rape. Bazil confides in Joe that he believes the rape might have had something to do with a case he once presided over. Among other cases, he shows Joe the case of Linda Wishkob, a white woman who had been abandoned by her family because of her birth defects. Linda was subsequently adopted into the Wishkob (Ojibwe) family and lived with them on reservation land. Joe cannot make a connection between this case and his mother's rape, but he gradually learns that Linda's birth mother later re-established contact with her in order to procure her kidney for Linda's twin brother, Linden Lark, who grew up to be a violent racist drunk.
As Geraldine sinks further into depression, Joe begins to spend more time with his uncle Whitey and his aunt (by marriage) Sonja, a former stripper, for whom Joe lusts. Sonja treats him almost as an adopted son, and the two grow close. When one day Joe is out looking in the water he notices a doll. Picking it up out of the water, he removes the head and discovers forty thousand dollars in cash stuffed inside the doll. He takes the money to Sonja, and she helps him distribute the money amongst various banks, making him promise he will use it for his education. However, shortly after this exchange, Sonja uses the money to buy herself presents.
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