Louise Erdrich’s haunting new novel of a brutal crime on the reservation

A review of The Round House, by Louise Erdrich

@@@@@ (5 out of 5)

At its best, fiction transports us to places we’ve never been, immersing us in the lives of people we would never meet. The most powerful fiction leaves behind indelible memories, endowing its characters with meaning more vivid than life.  Louise Erdrich received the National Book Award for The Round House, which is powerful beyond measure and achieved all this and more.

Erdrich centers her tale on a bright 13-year-old boy named Joe Coutts. When we first encounter Joe, we think we may have met him before. He’s the nice kid who lives down the block or around the corner, riding his bike, usually with his friends, through a middle-class suburb, getting into mischief. His father’s a judge, his mother a civil servant. How could his life be all that interesting?

But Joe’s parents aren’t really like our neighbors, and they don’t live in a middle-class suburb or a prosperous urban neighborhood. Though well-educated and well-off by local standards, they are members of the tightly interwoven Chippewa community confined to a reservation in a barren stretch of North Dakota or Minnesota. And The Round House is a tale of a brutal crime that afflicts the Coutts family and lays bare the deep fault lines in their community.

As we get to know the Couttses and the many members of their extended family, we gradually become acquainted with the cruel legacy of racism that constrains their lives to this day. Sometimes we laugh along with them at the humor, marvel at the beauty of their story-telling, sigh with despair at the loss of the old ways. But we are never unaware of the uniquely disadvantaged circumstances they and their neighbors find themselves in.

The Round House is Louise Erdrich’s 14th novel. She is an enrolled (i.e., official) member of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa Nation whose grandfather was tribal chairman around the time of her birth in the 1950s. For three decades, she has been writing highly acclaimed works about her Native American heritage and the interaction of Native and majority communities. (Her father was German-American.)

An extended account of Erdrich’s life and career appears on Wikipedia, with numerous details about her long, tragic marriage to anthropologist Michael Dorris, whom she met as a student at Dartmouth College in the 1970s. Knowing some of the details of her life, it’s easy to understand how Erdrich can write of the pain her characters suffer.

“Wrong Man Running?” I’m tempted to say, “Wrong Man Writing”

A review of Wrong Man Running, by Alan Hruska

@@@ (3 out of 5)

Sometimes I wonder when I finish a book why I picked it up in the first place. This was one of those times.

As thrillers go, Wrong Man Running works. It’s suspenseful (which probably explains why I felt compelled to finish reading it), and the protagonist elicited sympathy.

Rick Corinth is a hotshot lawyer nearing 40 who currently serves as deputy DA in New York City, heir apparent to his long-incumbent boss. Mystifyingly, when a series of violent rapes begins to surface, the victims are all women he knows well, and in short order Rick is suspected of the crime. Once he is formally charged, he flees in order to devote himself to finding the real perpetrator. Then the plot thickens.

Unfortunately, like so much pulp fiction, the tale hangs on a series of unlikely coincidences, and practically every character in this book is either drop-dead gorgeous (women) or just gorgeous (men) — or, in a very few cases, ugly. I don’t know about you, but I find this pandering to Hollywood producers tiresome. Oh, yes, we’ll probably see Wrong Man Running on the big screen one of these days. If you like looking at beautiful people and being shocked by what they do, you might consider going. Otherwise, save your ten bucks.