He has no imaginative access to the visceral nightmare of sexual assault. Unlike Erdrich's other novels, which feature an assortment of narrators or points of view, The Round House is limited by what Joe himself can understand. Rather, this is the story of a teenage boy whose world and self are pulled apart and reassembled in the course of a year. But rape isn't really the subject of The Round House. It's possible to be horrified by this situation without the dramatic assistance of a novel, which is not to say that rape and reservation life can't serve as a premise for fiction. One in three Native women will report being raped in her lifetime, and 86% of the perpetrators are non-Native men, most of whom have good cause to expect they'll get away with it. Geraldine was attacked somewhere near the ceremonial structure that gives the novel its title, and the land thereabouts is a jigsaw puzzle of state, federal and tribal territories, each with different laws and different officials empowered to enforce them.
As Erdrich explains in her afterword, conflicts of jurisdiction and sovereignty have long made it difficult to prosecute non-Native men for the rape of Native-American women on or around reservations. There is the assault on Geraldine – not just the question of who committed it, but almost as important, where. The Round House, winner of the 2012 National Book Award for fiction, is a fusion of two stories, although that seedling image suggests an apter term: grafting. Soon, father and son will learn that Geraldine, Joe's lovely mother, has been brutally raped, and the different ways the boy and the man respond to this trauma can be construed from this seemingly mundane beginning. The symbolism is a shade heavy-handed, a fault that has been found with Erdrich's books in the past. For the first time ever, Joe's old man, a judge on an Ojibwe reservation in North Dakota in the late 1980s, tires of the task before the boy does and leaves him to finish up. A t the beginning of The Round House, the novel's 13-year-old narrator, Joe, is helping his father pry out tree seedlings that have lodged in the cement-block foundation of his family's house.
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