1. The primary storyline of Louise Erdrich's novel, The Round House, occurs in 1988. It's centered upon the rape of Joe the narrator's mother, Geraldine, and the crushing impact of this assault on Geraldine and her family. I thought this story was going to be a procedural, but about half way into The Round House, the story reveals the assailant. Now I'm thinking the novel will develop the story of the criminal case of this assault getting mired in the complicated justice system where, on Indian reservations, the prosecution of crimes gets muddied by uncertainty about jurisdiction -- is it a tribal police case? an FBI case? a state police case? etc. -- and I'm guessing it will be further gummed up by the difficulties inherent in prosecuting sexual assault.
I really don't know, at this point, if Erdrich's novel is headed in this direction, but I thought I'd write out my guess. I'm also guessing that Louise Erdrich will move this story into other kinds of depth that I haven't imagined.
That's her remarkable gift as a novelist.
2. At Trader Joe's Monday, one of my for the fun of it purchases was a Sesame Teriyaki Beef Skirt Steak.
I was eager to cook it. I had a plan in my. head of dividing the steak between Debbie and me and eating it with basmati rice and sautéed zucchini.
As it turned out, Debbie arrived home and wasn't hungry.
Garrenteed BBQ catered a mid-day meal for the school district and Debbie ate enough that she didn't want or need dinner.
So, I changed things up a bit.
I cut the steak in half and refrigerated the half I wasn't going to eat.
I cut the half I held out for me into cubes.
I got out the wok and stir fried the sesame/teriyaki skirt steak, onion, zucchini, and a bit of yellow summer squash and some fresh spinach. I'd already cooked a small pot of rice and added some of it to the wok.
The meat was seasoned enough in the package that I didn't think I'd need to add any other sauce, but after a couple bites, I decided to add a light sprinkling of soy sauce.
It all worked.
I'm not sure just yet what I'll do with the other half of the steak, but I do know that I am pretty happy that I made this mad, fun, unnecessary purchase!
3. A little more about Louise Erdrich.
The other day I remarked that of all the genres of writing, the novel is the most flexible.
Louise Erdrich's work epitomizes this.
I have no idea what the priest, Father Travis, she introduces into this story will have to do with the second half of the novel. But, Erdrich digresses from the main current of her story to unfold that Father Travis was a U. S. Marine who survived, but was seriously injured by, the 1983 barracks bombing in Beirut. Furthermore, Father Travis grew up in Texas. As a child, his father took him to see President Kennedy in Dallas and Father Travis witnessed the Kennedy assassination.
This imaginary trip back to November 22, 1963 came a bit after another digressive tale about a woman who was rejected by her white family at birth, taken in by an Indian family on the reservation, and who is then approached by her long absent birth mother to donate a kidney to her long estranged twin brother.
I really wasn't expecting a kidney transplant to happen near the midway point of this novel!
These are just two of many examples where Louise Erdrich veers off of what seems to be the main focus of her novel and adds dimension to her story and has me wondering how these apparently unrelated digressions will end up being significant to the overall arc and development of her book.
I guess this is all to say that I've read negative comments on Amazon and Goodreads about expansive, digressive, multi-dimensional novels like The Round House (as of now, I haven't read any comments about The Round House).
Usually these negative comments complain about such novels jumping around in time, wandering off the main story and developing multiple subplots, and causing confusion by asking us, as readers, to keep multiple characters straight in our minds.
I understand.
Many readers just want story tellers to cut to the chase.
If you are a "cut to the chase" reader, I'd say Louise Erdrich's books will frustrate you.
But if you enjoy careful and detailed descriptions of the physical and mythological world and enjoy traveling into the somewhat recent past but also into the mythical ancient past, if you enjoy entering into the imagined lives of a whole host of characters occupying the fraught and overlapping worlds of white and Native people, and if you enjoy being challenged by ethical quandaries, religious quandaries, and stories that are neither neat nor tidy, then I'd say dive into the novels of Louise Erdrich!
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