"With “The Round House,” her 14th novel, Louise Erdrich takes us back to the North Dakota Ojibwe reservation that she has conjured and mapped in so many earlier books, and made as indelibly real as Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County or Joyce’s Dublin. This time she focuses on one nuclear family — the 13-year-old Joe Coutts; his mother, Geraldine; and his father, Judge Antone Coutts — that is shattered and remade after a terrible event.
Although its plot suffers from a schematic quality that inhibits Ms. Erdrich’s talent for elliptical storytelling, the novel showcases her extraordinary ability to delineate the ties of love, resentment, need, duty and sympathy that bind families together. “The Round House” — a National Book Award finalist in the fiction category — opens out to become a detective story and a coming-of-age story, a story about how Joe is initiated into the sadnesses and disillusionments of grown-up life and the somber realities of his people’s history.
The event that changes the Coutts family’s lives is the rape and savage beating of Geraldine, which occurs in 1988 near the round house, a place used for sacred ceremonies in “the old days when Indians could not practice their religion.” The attacker also douses Geraldine with gasoline and attempts to set her on fire, before she manages to escape. She has been so traumatized by the attack that she withdraws to her bedroom, refusing to eat or speak. Joe and his father realize that she has ascended to a “place of utter loneliness from which she might never be retrieved,” and when Joe suspects that the police investigation has been less than thorough, he sets out to solve the crime himself."
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