My essay, “Louise Erdrich’s Literary Children” is now available on the Ploughshares blog here. Here is a little of what I discussed of my favorite novelist’s approach to children in her novels, especially The Round House and LaRose:

Erdrich’s most recent triptych of novels—The Plague of Doves (2008), The Round House (2012), and LaRose (2016)—all feature children more prominently than adults. In each case, children are confronted with a many-layered moral question that their experiences over the course of the novel will help them to process. Notably, adults do not offer clear moral guidance. They do not have all the answers, and sometimes their answers are even harmful because they lack awareness of the context surrounding the child’s concern.

The Round House, narrated in first person by teenaged protagonist Joe Coutts, asks urgently, “How should a son handle the violent rape of his mother?” From the first sentence onward, this question is implicit in every interaction, even before Joe knows his mother has been raped.

…Erdrich demonstrates her maturity as a writer by choosing not to rush through this cataclysmic event in the life of a family. She appreciates fully how a single event can trigger feelings that move both spatially (from person to person and place to place) and temporally (within the same person or place over time, even over generations). Continue reading…

As a writer and editor, I am continuously in awe of Erdrich’s ability to sustain moral complexity through the experiences of children without exploiting them or using them as passive carriers of adult ideals.