“Small trees had attacked my parents’ house at the foundation,” says Joe Coutts, the 13-year-old narrator, in the opening sentence of The Round House (Harper), Louise Erdrich’s latest novel. They were just seedlings, but they’d grown into the cement blocks, and Joe says it’s “difficult to pry them loose.”
Violence against Native American women is rampant. In an afterword, Erdrich points to shocking statistics cited by a 2009 Amnesty International report: one in three Native women is raped—they’re more than twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as other women in the U.S. Erdrich writes, too, that 86 percent of rapes and sexual assaults are perpetrated by non-Native men, though that figure, based on a Justice Department survey taken more than a decade ago, is questionable. The Amnesty report notes recent studies putting the figure at 58 percent, but that’s dubious as well: sexual assault is vastly underreported, which makes data on the profiles of perpetrators less reliable.
The perp’s mother was a “frail-looking little old white lady” but her “sense of entitlement was compelling,” Joe’s father tells him. She was “venomous,” and maybe her son had “absorbed her poison.” The perp’s sister isn’t toxic like the rest of the family—but that’s because she was rescued from her parents and raised by Indians. She tells Joe the attack occurred because her brother “set loose his monster. Not everybody’s got a monster, and most who do keep it locked up.”
In American Honor Killings, David McConnell explores male violence.
Karen Russell spins pain into parable in Vampires in the Lemon Grove.
Dan Baum’s Gun Guys could use less Baum, more guys.
A conversation with Natalie Y. Moore and Lance Williams, authors of The Almighty Black P Stone Nation.
Plus: Short takes on new books by local authors.
