The Round House

When it comes to the world of National Book Award novels, they are either ones that I love or I just think are fine... not anything great, but fine. When it comes to The Round House, by Louise Erdrich, I feel like this is the first of the National Book Award Winners that I really dislike. As much as the premise of the novel let me into the text, it did not do enough to keep me there, with annoying writing choices, and irritating deviations from the plot.

I liked how the tale of Joe growing up is handled. We see him come of age where he realizes, both directly through his mother's case, and indirectly through reading old court files, that the law is not perfect. More to the point, tribal law is not perfect as it is often a barrier to Native Americans receiving justice for crimes committed on them or their land. Joe learns this through the novel and it works as a way to show his coming of age, and understanding that the world is not the perfect place it can be where the good guys always win, like in Star Trek: The Next Generation, of which Joe is a big fan.

Now we come to the more objective part of this review: other than the main premise of the book, where Joe tries to find out who harmed his mother, I did not like anything else.

Firstly, there was the lack of punctuation marks denoting dialogue. Bear in mind when I say ‘lack' I mean none whatsoever, throughout the entire novel. I don't care who the author is, or the subject matter for the story, I have never like this style of writing, and I am likely to say that I never will.

Then there were the constant deviations from the main story. We get to see the back story and adventures of a great many characters in Joe's life, including his family, friends, mentors and even schoolboy fantasy crushes. Then we also get deviations into Native American lore and other explanations into their culture. The problem is this seems to have little to do with the overall plot of the novel, or why I began to read it in the first place. Every time I began to read another story that had little to do with finding the criminal, I would trudge on, thinking that I would understand how it would connect with the story if I read just one more page. If it did, many times, I could not find it. Honestly, feels as though I am missing something in this text, and I am thoroughly frustrated by it.

In the end, while this text is good enough to win the National Book Award, the back story into Native American lore, and the adventures with other characters did not keep me interested. Couple this with the lack of dialogue quotations, and I feel like this is a book is one I will not remember in a week. I give it a two out of five.