And it all began with that trusting moment where my father walked up behind my mother and she smiled at his approach without turning. He’d change his clothes quickly while she and I put the finishing touches on the meal and then we would sit down together. Eventually, he’d call me in to help him set the table. The’d stand there together in a little tableau of homecoming. In our old life, she would have kept working at the stove or sink while he peered over her shoulder and talked to her. Maybe he’d gone into the kitchen, just as he always used to, and then he’d put his arms around my mother as she stood with her back turned. My father had come in - surely Mom had heard the car, and hadn’t Pearl barked? His footsteps, too, were heavy. I looked at my parents and understood exactly what had happened. Between them on the floor lay a smashed and oozing casserole. My father was standing a few feet before her with his hands out, vainly groping in the air the shape of her, as if to hold her without holding her. My mother was backed up to the sink, trembling, breathing heavily.

Walking through the kitchen door, I heard a splintering crash. The Round House by Louise Erdrich is literary fiction disguised as a crime novel, a searing portrait of the decimation of one family which represents the unjust degradations committed against a nation. Joe, a thirteen year old member of the Ojibwe tribe, decides it is beyond the ability of his father, a judge, and mother to mete out justice so he and his best friend Cappy take matters into their own hands. She has been brutally attacked, raped and brutalized somewhere in the vicinity of a ceremonial Round House, a sacred space on the North Dakota reservation on which Joe and his family live. Joe’s mother arrives home covered in blood, in shock and severely physically and psychically injured. Collection of Oakland Museum of California.

Book review the round house