Strengths and weaknesses of Erdrich's The Round House

So let's take a moment to assess Louise Erdrich's The Round House, NBA (not basketball) winner and latest novel in her fabulous career; I've noted in previous posts that I think Erdrich will be the next American author to win a Nobel Prize, and I'm sticking with that - even though I found TRH ultimately disappointing, despite its strengths. Beginning with the positives: Erdrich takes an a serious and little-discussed theme, abuse of Indian women and the peculiarities of law that allow a non-Indian to walk off free after assaulting an Indian woman on Indian land. Erdrich also continues her many years of creating funny, quirky, and recognizably human (and humane) characters living within the single small community of a North Dakota reservation: she has put this piece of land on the world literary map in the same way that Faulkner put Yoknapatowpha County there. The book has some very boisterous scenes that are funny, some vividly rendered scenes such as the powwow episode; typical of Erdrich, she also works in some elements of Indian lore, religion, and legend, all with a light touch and an easy writing style that makes the book very pleasant to read. However: what starts off as a tense and taut and promising novel about centered on a powerful event - a woman is sexually assaulted, and her son and her husband, each in their own ways, set out to find the assailant and bring him to justice - falls apart, at least at the level of narrative, by the middle of the book. The crime is "solved" through an unlikely chain of coincidence, mysticism, and good fortune. Moreover, the circumstances of the crime are both over-the-top melodramatic and not well explored in the novel itself - we barely no or understand the assailant and his motives, and ultimately he's just a crazy guy. Wouldn't it have been a stronger novel if she'd written about a more typical on-reservation assault, a drunken bar scene gone bad of something, and not mixed it in with the governor of S.Dakota trying to adopt an Indian child and other murders and vengeance and mishigosh, to use a non-Indian term? The novel starts to come together in the final third as the young narrator takes it upon himself to exact justice and take down the man who raped his mother. Erdrich does draw us into these scenes, but I'm afraid she has by this point in the novel lost touch with her narrator: he does not think, behave, or suffer the way a 13-year-old boy would upon planning to kill someone and then in fact shooting him to death. A whole novel could begin, not end, there! Many strengths in this novel but in this case Erdrich's capacious imagination and creativity has gotten the best of her and the story wanders all over the place, in search of a home - as if it were created in fits and starts over a long period of time.