The Round House by Louise Erdrich Harper, 321 pp., $27.99 The
loss of their land was lodged inside of them forever. —The
Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich Dense with meaning, both
symbolic and literal, the first scene of Louise Erdrich’s
fourteenth novel, the National Book Award–winning The Round
House, involves an arduous attempt at the pruning of small trees
that have “attacked my parents’ house at the foundation.” Only
seedlings with very few leaves, the tiny predators have
nonetheless managed to squeeze through cracks in shingles and
into a wall: “I thought it was a wonder the treelets had
persisted through a North Dakota winter.” The foundations of the
Coutts household are under assault from without; father and son
will unite to protect it, but belatedly, and incompletely. The
narrator Joe, thirteen years old at this time, in 1988,
continues to “pry at the hidden rootlings” after his father,
Bazil Coutts, a judge in his Native American tribe, has given up
the difficult task; so too will Joe, despite his