One Thing I Learned: Louise Erdrich’s The Round House
The adolescent perspective is not unique in harboring childish thoughts. It is unique in its incapacity to sort, compartmentalize, or subordinate them. Our thirteen-year old hero deals with tragedy and revenge in a head that cannot quite order the gravity of these things above its childhood crushes, its star trek fandom, its boyhood escapes. The hierarchy of these priorities fluctuates almost charmingly throughout the novel. The tragedy, then, is completed when adulthood seizes center stage, and the child cannot give it full berth. The child, in the final pages of the novel, struggles to allow adulthood the space and attention it requires, and falls apart in its final self-defeating attempt at escape.
Coming-of-age is marked by an original sin. If the child doesn’t hurt someone in a way that shocks them, that makes them first realize and recoil from their own power, then they haven’t really come of age at all. It is the first regret that makes us adults. It is Cain looking dumbly over his brother and moaning.