The Round House

“Women don't realize how much store men set on the regularity of their habits. We absorb their comings and goings into our bodies, their rhythms into our bones.”

Geraldine’s husband and son feel her absence, revealing that men rely on women like timepieces. Without women, men have no sense of direction or purpose.

“I was the sort of kid who spent a Sunday afternoon prying little trees out of the foundation of his parents’ house. I should have given in to the inevitable truth that this was the sort of person I would become, in the end, but I kept fighting it.” 

Just as Joe wants his father to be a larger-than-life figure as a reservation judge, he imagines a far greater role in life for himself despite his easygoing nature and circumstances that say otherwise.

“I already knew, too, that these questions would not change the facts. But they would inevitably change the way we sought justice.” 

Joe shows his maturity in his understanding that the questions being asked will never change what happened to his mother, but they will change who has jurisdiction over the case and what means he and his father have to bring his mother’s attacker to justice.

“This was our ritual. Our breaking bread, our communion. And it all began with that trusting moment where my father walked up behind my mother and she smiled at his approach without turning. But now they stood staring at each other helplessly over the broken dish.” 

The impact of the rape hits home as Joe sees his mother shrink away from his father in fear. Rituals, like his father sneaking up behind his mother, are now withering away one by one due to the violence of rape.

“My father was punishing hot dog thieves and examining washers—not even washing machines—just washers worth 15 cents apiece.” 

Joe is disheartened to find that his father is not some larger-than-life judge trying murders but a workaday judge with “boring” responsibilities.

“‘It is these people really,’ said my father, ‘small-time hypocrites, who may in special cases be capable of monstrous acts if given the chance.’” 

Bazil Coutts foreshadows the truth here, suggesting that the Larks are capable of monstrous acts despite their small-mindedness.

“I stood there in the shadowed doorway thinking with my tears. Yes, tears can be thoughts, why not?” 

Joe feels his mother’s pain, and through his pain, represented by tears, he tries to understand how his mother was attacked.

“And so to be afraid of entering the cemetery by night was to fear not the loving ancestors who lay buried, but the gut kick of our history, which I was bracing to absorb.” 

The fear of the dead is not the usual irrational fear of the young or easily frightened, but the fear of reality, of real events that took place in Native American history, causing Joe’s ancestors’ deaths.

“And here was the thing I didn’t understand then but do now—the loneliness … Nobody else was as desperate as the two of us, my father and I, to get our life back. To return to the Before.” 

Joe realizes that though his father does not want to involve him with the rape case, his father is lonely, and being around Joe allows him to feel connected to someone.

“I've read that certain memories put down in agitation at a vulnerable age do not extinguish with time, but engrave ever deeper as they return and return.” 

Joe is telling this story from his vantage point as an adult but remembers everything that took place. As such, his life has been informed by the horrible events that took place the spring his mother was raped and nearly murdered.

“My mother’s job is to know everybody’s secrets.”

This revelation by Joe underscores the probable reason for his mother being attacked. Geraldine Coutts knew too much about Mayla, and Linden Lark wanted her dead because of it.

“But a quick-acting poison, that’s different. It strikes with blind swiftness. You can be bit by temptation anytime. It is a thought, a direction, a noise in your brain, a hunch, an intuition that leads you to darker places than you’ve ever imagined.” 

Temptation is described as a dangerous poison, one that can take any shape and strike at any time. Temptation can be viewed as a poison that strikes many of the characters in the novel.

“She told him that he had survived by doing the opposite of all the others. Where they abandoned, he saved. Where they were cruel, he was kind. Where they betrayed, he was faithful.” 

This underscores the power, individuality, and growth that come of not going with the flow or following the crowd.

“What I am doing now is for the future, though it may seem small, or trivial, or boring to you.” 

Joe’s father assures his son that the “boring” work he is doing as a reservation judge is vital to laying the foundations of tribal law. The quotation also highlights how nothing in the narrative is as trivial as it seems.

“That was when my father had his first heart attack—it turned out to be a small one. Not even a medium one. Just a small one. But it was a heart attack.” 

Though Bazil has a small heart attack, Joe knows that there is no such thing as a “small” heart attack and that the stress of dealing with the rape and Linden’s release are powerful, dangerous triggers.

“The only thing that God can do, and does all of the time, is to draw good from any evil situation.” 

Father Travis reveals that God gives humankind free will. Instead of always changing the outcome, He attempts to take good from situations, thus redeeming the situation.

“We are never so poor that we cannot bless another human being, are we? So it is that every evil, whether moral or material, results in good. You'll see.” 

This quotation foreshadows the great moral ambiguity that the book will end with. When Joe kills Linden to avenge his family, the reader must determine if this “evil act” has resulted in good or not.

“Now that I knew fear, I also knew it was not permanent. As powerful as it was, its grip on me would loosen. It would pass.” 

Fear is a powerful force, but Joe realizes that it is also a force for knowledge and growth. Instead of being stuck in fear, he realizes that it is temporary.

“I’ve done what I had to do. There is no going back. And whatever happens, I can take.” 

Joe shows a sense of fatality and maturity in the aftermath of killing Linden Lark. He is resolved and realizes that he cannot take back his actions, actions that he feels were needed to ensure his family’s peace.

“And how funny, strange, that a thing can grow so powerful even when planted in the wrong place. Ideas too, I muttered. Ideas.” 

Joe connects the growth of saplings and weeds in the wrong place to the growth of wrong ideas like rape or murder.

“Any judge knows there are many kinds of justice—for instance, ideal justice as opposed to the best-we-can-do justice, which is what we end up with in making so many of our decisions.” 

Tribal law is reduced to a “best-case scenario” situation, a frustrating fact that Joe, his friends, and family must deal with on a constant basis and which includes his mother’s case.

“They’d built that place to keep their people together and to ask for mercy from the Creator, since justice was so sketchily applied on earth.”

The irony of the round house, or sweathouse, is that it is a building constructed to commune with the Creator, though others see them as heathenistic.

“We passed over in a sweep of sorrow that would persist into our small forever. We just keep going.” 

Joe realizes that sorrow will remain; the trick is to just continue living. He and his family have faced many tragedies, but they must keep moving forward.