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A review by thelizabeth
The Round House by Louise Erdrich
5.0
Feeling generous with my five stars, these last couple days. There was so much I loved about this book, all the way through, that really only got interrupted right at the end. That end! This was a book club pick where it was just not okay for anyone to show up without having finished the last page!
Some people have said: this book isn't sure what it is trying to be. There's some genre mystery, at first, until that sort of goes away. There's some revenge crime. Quite a bit of coming-of-age. Folklore. A decades-long cultural picture of the Anishinaabe reservation town. There's tropes from all sorts, and none specifically from beginning to end. I guess this reads as messy to some, but it didn't to me. Not when the book is this awesome, and not when I enjoyed it all so, so much.
First of all, something is wrong with me and I had never known of Louise Erdrich before somebody selected that we read this one. This is only her fourteenth extremely well-received novel, so, that's understandable, right? Also, she is doing so many things I love in her work. The Faulkner-esque way her characters fit together through each of the novels into family histories, generations, into a town, is one of my favorite uses of literature. I read just one and feel the universe is unfolding its secrets to me. So in a way, this book being great was enough to make a lifelong fan of me, because I want all those secrets, every one. I'll wend my way to more of them, undoubtedly.
Here's what I loved about this one: our young narrator Joe's family, to whom something awful happens, was so loving and real to me. Both his father and his mother were great characters. The way they struggled to cope together, and individually, and managed not to break completely moved me a lot. I felt that the initial plot, of the brutal attack and rape of Joe's mother, was handled well: a woman retreating after a trauma can be a way for her reality to be swept under the rug of the narrative while her men take care of her, but I felt that she emerged at just the right time to prevent this cliche. She airs her story out quite thoroughly (perhaps too thoroughly, for Joe), and though she isn't the main character, we see her recover in a realistic way as the story deepens.
What's it deepen into? One of my favorite threads that emerged is the backstory of the white characters, Linda and Linden, twins with a birth story worthy of a folktale but who are simply our characters' neighbors. I loved the actual folktales of Nanapush (seen previously in Erdrich's novel Tracks) via Joe's loony grandfather, and the ghost. I loved Joe's friends, geeks on a mission. I loved the soldier-priest, letting them watch Alien through the window. And I loved Sonja, and the money.
It deepens into a whole lot more, too, spoilers for which I'm just going to leave out of the review, I think. The finale is hugely shocking and upsetting. I was sure, certain, that someone would stop it from happening. Once I had to really watch it happen — and then the double shocker that comes at the very end — I didn't really know what to think. To my surprise, it all impeded my enthusiasm a bit. It's almost too big to settle. I think I have different feelings about the ending than I do for the rest of the novel. But it probably is one of those stories that couldn't have ended with anything less.
Some people have said: this book isn't sure what it is trying to be. There's some genre mystery, at first, until that sort of goes away. There's some revenge crime. Quite a bit of coming-of-age. Folklore. A decades-long cultural picture of the Anishinaabe reservation town. There's tropes from all sorts, and none specifically from beginning to end. I guess this reads as messy to some, but it didn't to me. Not when the book is this awesome, and not when I enjoyed it all so, so much.
First of all, something is wrong with me and I had never known of Louise Erdrich before somebody selected that we read this one. This is only her fourteenth extremely well-received novel, so, that's understandable, right? Also, she is doing so many things I love in her work. The Faulkner-esque way her characters fit together through each of the novels into family histories, generations, into a town, is one of my favorite uses of literature. I read just one and feel the universe is unfolding its secrets to me. So in a way, this book being great was enough to make a lifelong fan of me, because I want all those secrets, every one. I'll wend my way to more of them, undoubtedly.
Here's what I loved about this one: our young narrator Joe's family, to whom something awful happens, was so loving and real to me. Both his father and his mother were great characters. The way they struggled to cope together, and individually, and managed not to break completely moved me a lot. I felt that the initial plot, of the brutal attack and rape of Joe's mother, was handled well: a woman retreating after a trauma can be a way for her reality to be swept under the rug of the narrative while her men take care of her, but I felt that she emerged at just the right time to prevent this cliche. She airs her story out quite thoroughly (perhaps too thoroughly, for Joe), and though she isn't the main character, we see her recover in a realistic way as the story deepens.
What's it deepen into? One of my favorite threads that emerged is the backstory of the white characters, Linda and Linden, twins with a birth story worthy of a folktale but who are simply our characters' neighbors. I loved the actual folktales of Nanapush (seen previously in Erdrich's novel Tracks) via Joe's loony grandfather, and the ghost. I loved Joe's friends, geeks on a mission. I loved the soldier-priest, letting them watch Alien through the window. And I loved Sonja, and the money.
It deepens into a whole lot more, too, spoilers for which I'm just going to leave out of the review, I think. The finale is hugely shocking and upsetting. I was sure, certain, that someone would stop it from happening. Once I had to really watch it happen — and then the double shocker that comes at the very end — I didn't really know what to think. To my surprise, it all impeded my enthusiasm a bit. It's almost too big to settle. I think I have different feelings about the ending than I do for the rest of the novel. But it probably is one of those stories that couldn't have ended with anything less.