Reading Order
The Round House Reading Order
Louise Erdrich's The Round House (2012) is a standalone novel following Joe Coutts, a thirteen-year-old boy on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota in 1988, whose mother Geraldine is brutally raped and who spends the summer trying to find out what happened to her while she withdraws into herself and the legal system fails to bring her attacker to justice because of the jurisdictional complexities of reservation land. Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
Where to start
The Round House
Complete The Round House Book List
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The Round House
Louise Erdrich·2012·The complete novel. Can be read as a standalone, though it is part of Erdrich's North Dakota series. - Buy
LaRose
OptionalLouise Erdrich·2016·Two North Dakota families — Landreaux Iron accidentally kills his neighbor's son and, following an old Ojibwe tradition, gives his own son LaRose to the grieving family — Erdrich's follow-up to The Round House in her North Dakota series; the closest in tone and concern to The Round House. - Buy
Love Medicine
OptionalLouise Erdrich·1984·Erdrich's debut novel and the entry point to her North Dakota series — the most direct companion to The Round House in its portrait of the same reservation world.
The Round House — Frequently Asked Questions
What is the round house in the novel?
The round house of the title is a ceremonial building on the Ojibwe reservation where Joe's mother Geraldine was attacked — a sacred space on the boundary between several different legal jurisdictions (state land, tribal land, individual trust land, federal land), and this ambiguity of jurisdiction is one of the novel's central subjects. Because the attack occurred at or near the round house, it is unclear which court system has jurisdiction over the crime: tribal courts have limited criminal jurisdiction under the laws that existed in 1988, and the complex patchwork of reservation land jurisdiction that results from the history of the allotment era makes it nearly impossible for any court system to prosecute the attacker. The round house is thus simultaneously a sacred ceremonial space and a legal trap: it is the place where the crime was committed precisely because the attacker knew that its jurisdictional ambiguity would make prosecution difficult. The novel's investigation of this jurisdictional problem is an investigation of the legacy of nineteenth-century federal Indian policy in contemporary Native American life: the allotment era created the patchwork of land ownership that makes the round house's location legally ambiguous, and the limitations on tribal criminal jurisdiction that existed in 1988 (and that have since been partially addressed by the Violence Against Women Act reauthorizations and the Tribal Law and Order Act) are a direct result of the federal policy of diminishing tribal sovereignty.
How does The Round House handle the theme of justice?
The Round House is organized around a gap: the gap between what justice requires and what the legal system can provide in the specific context of a Native American reservation in 1988. Joe's mother was raped, her attacker is known, and the legal system cannot prosecute him because of jurisdictional complexities that have nothing to do with the merits of the case. Joe, at thirteen, encounters this gap directly and decides to fill it himself — the novel's second half is organized around his plan to take justice into his own hands. Erdrich does not resolve this moral dilemma easily: the novel takes seriously both the justice of Joe's anger and the cost of the action he takes; it also takes seriously the systemic problem that produced the situation. Joe's father Bazil, a tribal judge, is working through the legal system to address the jurisdictional problem, and the novel's epilogue reveals what he accomplished; but the legal resolution comes after the fact, and the novel does not pretend that systemic change can undo personal damage. The Round House is one of the clearest literary treatments of the legal status of Native American reservation communities and the specific vulnerabilities it creates for Native women.
Why does The Round House matter as a political novel?
The Round House was published in 2012 at a moment when the rates of violence against Native American women — dramatically higher than those against women in other racial and ethnic groups, and dramatically less likely to result in prosecution — were beginning to receive serious attention in American public discourse. The Violence Against Women Act reauthorization of 2013 extended tribal court jurisdiction over non-Indian perpetrators for the first time; The Round House — published in October 2012, shortly before VAWA's reauthorization — is partly a contribution to this political debate. Erdrich has said explicitly that she wanted to write a novel about the jurisdictional problem that leaves Native American women particularly vulnerable, and that she researched the legal situation carefully before writing. But The Round House is not only a political novel: it is also a coming-of-age story, a portrait of a reservation community, and an investigation of how a boy becomes a man when his father and the institutions his father represents cannot protect his family. The political argument and the literary achievement are inseparable.
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