39 pages • 1 hour read
Louise ErdrichThe Round House
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 1-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1
Joe Coutts and his father, Bazil, are busy with yard work, digging up saplings that are destroying their home’s foundation. Bazil stops to take a nap, but Joe continues, feeling invigorated. He later sneaks into his father’s study to read legal books, including Felix S. Cohen’s Handbook of Federal Indian Law. Bazil catches his son reading, though does not say anything, perhaps signifying that Joe is now a man and ready for the weight of what he is reading. It is Sunday and both men are hungry. That it is afternoon and Sunday causes them to question where Geraldine, wife and mother, is. The narrative suggests that women are like clocks to men, that men regulate their lives around the well-organized lives of women. With Geraldine’s absence, neither Joe nor Bazil know what to do. They decide to search for Geraldine in town.
Joe and Bazil walk to Bazil’s sister Clemence’s house and borrow the car as Geraldine has taken the family car. Bazil thinks Geraldine might be having car trouble somewhere, while Joe remembers her saying she would go to work to retrieve a file. When they drive to her office, Geraldine is not there. They then head into town. Bazil wonders if Geraldine has forgotten it is Sunday and so went to the grocery store. On their way into town, they see Geraldine speed past them, seemingly agitated. They are relieved, though they had been trying not to show their agitation up until this point. Bazil jokes that Geraldine must be embarrassed about forgetting what day it is and going to the market, so he purposely takes his time dropping the car back and returning home.
When Joe and Bazil return home, however, they find Geraldine still sitting in the car, hunched over. They run up to the car and see that she is bleeding and in a near catatonic state. Bazil tries talking to her to getting her out the car, but she will not budge. He then helps her to the back of the car and they drive her to the hospital. Clemence arrives later, while Joe is waiting in the lobby to find out what has happened to his mom. Joe deals with a racist pregnant woman in the lobby who mentions loudly that his mother must have been raped and wonders aloud why they do not take the “Indians” to their own hospital. Joe’s rage seeps up, and he verbally attacks the woman, and then rips up her magazine. For the first time, Joe is faced with the word “rape” and what it might mean in conjunction with his mother’s attack.
Joe is finally able to see his mother, whose wounds are swollen. He overhears that she must have surgery. Later, Joe overhears his father, a well-respected judge on the reservation, speaking with law enforcement officials. Three different groups arrive: the local police, the tribal police, and the FBI. From what Joe can gather from the questions his father asks, there is confusion over where the attack happened, meaning that no one knows who has jurisdiction over the crime. Joe is overwhelmed by this, and his father makes him go wait in the lobby again. In the lobby, Joe is comforted by his aunt Clemence. Clemence answers his questions about rape, the attack, and the surgery without mincing words, and they cry together.
Chapter 2
Joe has been out of school since his mother’s attack, but when she returns home, he must return to school. His best friend, Cappy Lafournais, gives him a stone he calls a thunderbird egg for strength, and Joe keeps it on him always. Joe mentions that Cappy will die young, but that he and his other friends helped him in this tough time. His other friends are Zack Peace, the stepson of a local tribal officer, and Angus. Angus lives with his Aunt Star and her boyfriend, Elwin. Cappy’s father is both a janitor and the occasional chairman of the tribe. He returns to janitorial work when he gets sick of politics. Joe mentions how he and his friends love to watch Star Trek: The Next Generation, going through a list of their favorite characters.
One day, Joe returns from school to find his house a ghostly shell of the lively place it once was. He tries to prepare himself something to eat but finds that the milk has soured. This is a pivotal revelation; his mother never lets milk sour. Overcome with fear, he rushes up to his mother’s room to wake her and is hit in the head when she becomes confused and frightened upon waking. Geraldine gives Joe money to buy more milk and he leaves on his bike, hurt.
Joe bikes to his Uncle Whitey’s gas station. He had thought of asking his friends, but he wants to see his uncle’s girlfriend, Sonja, alone. Joe has a crush on Sonja. Sonja used to be a stripper, and Joe likes when she hugs him as she is a busty woman. Sonja hugs Joe as he hoped and promises to give the Coutts one of her dogs, Pearl, to help Geraldine feel safer. Joe does not want the dog as Sonja’s dogs are all mean, but thanks her and eventually returns home.
That night, he and his father must scramble a meal together as Geraldine is still in bed suffering from her trauma. Joe asks his father more questions, questions which Bazil answers despite his misgivings about Joe being involved. Joe learns that his mother’s attacker had also attempted to kill her by setting her on fire. The matches were wet, however. The police found the matches, their first real clue. The matches were from a golf course that is adjacent to the reservation. Bazil also tells Joe about the spare key he put on the car. Geraldine always locked herself out of the car and so Bazil decided to place a key there for such times. This spare key perhaps saved her life as she was able to reach it and flee her attacker.
The Coutts continue to tread lightly with Geraldine’s attack so fresh, but Bazil and Joe want Geraldine to feel better. One night, Bazil makes dinner for the family and purposely makes it taste terrible. Geraldine promises to get better so that she can make them meals again. Joe is not too upset by the bad meal as he will get a free meal later when he helps Cappy at the sweathouse. Cappy’s family, including his older brother Randall, assists with the sweathouse. While waiting for the men to finish up, Cappy and Joe hear an explosion and see the men running out of the lodge naked. It is later learned that the new medicine Cappy threw on the fire was chili powder from peppers he received as a gift. Joe dislikes ritual in general and does not like to pray, but Randall later tells him that he saw a strange man in his vision, and that the man was warning Joe of something.
For a while, things seem to return to normal. Geraldine cooks and cleans and seems on the road to recovery. Bazil brings some of his work home, shocking Joe, as his father always separates work life from home life. When Joe returns to the car one night to help his father bring in the stacks of court cases, he hears a scream and a thud and rushes inside. He finds his mother and father on the floor, with a spilled casserole. Joe realizes that his father has done what he always does, a ritual where he sneaks up behind Geraldine and pretends to scare her. Due to her attack, she was truly scared and dropped the casserole. As Joe watches his mother retreat up the stairs and into her bedroom, he realizes that things will never be the same for his family. Joe and Bazil set about searching for clues to the attacker’s identity in Bazil’s old court cases.
Chapter 3
Joe and Bazil read through a large stack of old court cases having to do with the reservation. They are looking for possible leads to Geraldine’s attacker. In time, Joe gets tired. He is also disappointed as he had imagined his father as a judge who presided over murders and horrible criminals. Most of the cases, if not all, are about petty crimes and civil disputes. Joe’s father tells him that his work is just as important, and that the secret to the attacker may be in the files. One of the most important cases deals with Mrs. Lark, a white woman who sued the reservation to try to gain—and develop—a large plot of land. This land was left to her biological daughter, Linda Wishkob. Linda was adopted by the Wishkobs when the Larks abandoned her, yet the Larks felt the land belonged to them. Bazil explains the situation by showing Joe how Mrs. Lark’s gas station, the one listed in the court case, suffered greatly because of the reservation. The Larks were mean people, and they charged Native Americans different prices. This discrimination ended in a lawsuit against them. A new gas station, this time on the reservation, was opened by Whitey, Joe’s uncle. The Larks lost their bid for the land and most of their customers. Mrs. Lark, and her son Linden, were angry at the outcome. Though Mrs. Lark is now dead, her son Linden is alive and dangerous enough to have attacked Geraldine.
Another case involves an incident at the old round house, where a white man was later found dead after drinking too much. The incident was ruled as negligence on the part of the deceased, but the case set a precedent for who decides jurisdiction and who handles a case. Bazil also tells Joe that he believes Geraldine’s attack to have happened at the round house. Native Americans used to conduct sacred rituals at the round house; attacking Geraldine there would signify an extreme hatred of Native American law and customs. The matches from the golf course, the ones used in the attack, were also found at the round house.
Chapter 1-Chapter 3 Analysis
The narrative opens with a violent act, the rape and attempted murder of Geraldine Coutts. The violent, frenzied rape is in contrast to the slow, methodical way that Joe and his father, Bazil, carry on about the house. The two remove saplings from the yard; the saplings foreshadow the uprooting of the family due to violence. The beginning chapters also show just how necessary Geraldine is in the lives of her husband and son. They are a strong family unit, a unit held together by Geraldine’s presence. The two men realize that, without Geraldine around, they have no sense of time or direction. In this sense, women are symbolic of clocks or timepieces that men set their lives to. Geraldine is also symbolic of her flowers outside. When she grows, life itself grows. The men in her life grow. When something foreign chokes out that life and growth, as in the case of her rape, the life around her also suffers. The family unit is strongly characterized as a microcosm of cause and effect.
Joe’s life deteriorates as his mother sinks further into herself. Though he wants to be a man and feel mature, he sees life standing still with his mother’s attack. Where once he thought that tribal law and his desire to learn tribal law made him an important figure, a man even and like his father, with the uncertainty of where his mother was raped, no one knows what law will prevail, if any. Law, which Joe once placed his faith in and the foundation his father built his life upon as a judge on the reservation, is broken, too, by the violent act of rape. Yet Joe and Bazil must muddle through and rely on the law, ineffective though it might be in helping them. They turn to court cases, highlighting how the past can affect the present and how the lives of Joe’s friends and family are inextricably tied to upholding tribal law.
Revealing bad blood between whites and Native Americans, the old court cases offer a ray of hope for Bazil and Joe as Bazil believes he can find his wife’s attacker in the cases. The rape reportedly took place at an old Native American site, the round house. This grave offense means that someone could have chosen the place to “hit back” at Native American law and customs. Joe also learns a lesson about mundanity. He has always idolized his father as a judge who deals with murderers and criminals, the very worst of society. Reading through the old court cases, he realizes that his father presides over what Joe views as “humdrum” activities. His father is quick to point out that the everyday, humdrum affairs are exactly what established tribal law and make the justice system work for them. He also informs Joe that knowledge of Geraldine’s attacker is inside the cases, thus underscoring the significance of everyday details.
With the introduction of Joe’s friends Cappy, Zack, and Angus, the reader finds that Joe has a group of people who operate as a surrogate family. Despite the heinous act done to his mother, Joe is a teenager who likes playing with his friends and watching Star Trek. This helps to orient Joe as a child both capable of growth and one who is being made to grow up too fast due to his mother’s attack. The section highlights how important friends and family are in the toughest of times and how the ability to rely on others when one is down is a mature act.
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