The walking wounded
An incident in the Minnesota woods leads to an unexpected death that scars everyone involved
Only one person dies in the core incident of David Treuer’s novel “Prudence,” but everyone involved is fatally wounded. In succinct, finely tuned prose, Treuer visits the violent event from the viewpoint of each important person on the scene, revealing the assumptions and lies that shape their understanding of it — and the secret sorrows they carry from that day forward, ravaging their hearts like stray shrapnel.
Treuer was raised on the Leech Lake reservation in northern Minnesota. While his mother was Ojibwe, his father was an Austrian Jewish survivor of the Holocaust. Treuer uses both strands of his heritage in “Prudence.”
In a recent interview with the Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row Journal, Treuer told Kevin Nance one point of departure for his novel was reading a boast from Ernest Hemingway that the first woman he “ever pleasured was a halfbreed Ojibwe girl named Prudence Bolton.” In retaliation, perhaps, for that crude remark, Treuer names an obnoxious minor character in this novel Ernie.
In the summer of 1942, Frankie Washburn returns to the Pines, his parents’ rustic northern Minnesota resort, for a short visit before heading for aviation cadet training. Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it?
But the players buzz with unspoken tension. His mother Emma, who has made the Pines her personal project, hovers anxiously; Felix, her diligent Ojibwe handyman, compares her to a partridge, “clucking and clucking and drumming her wings, jumping up on logs and down, circling her chicks…” Frankie’s distant father Jonathan, a doctor, comes to the Pines reluctantly from their home in Oak Park, Ill.; he’d rather be back there, reading papers and plonking compliant nurses. (He may be something of a eugenicist, too, landing him on my shortlist of creepiest characters in this year’s new fiction.)
Even though he’s a Princeton lad, Frankie vibrates with his own anxiety about not living up to his parents’ expectations and wanting to prove himself as a man. Billy, an Ojibwe youth and boyhood friend, also longs for Frankie’s return. Their intimacy, in this time and place, is truly a love that dare not speak its name. Treuer depicts its growth, in their memories and flashbacks, realistically and tenderly. Their love is not only expressed physically; Frankie urges Billy to finish high school, “the only Indian in his class to do so,” and asks his mother to send Billy books — her care packages include Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather. “They were romantic things, those collections, but couldn’t really, really do a young man harm,” she thinks.
German prisoners of war live behind a high fence in a camp across the river from the Pines (both Minnesota and Wisconsin housed German POWs during World War II). On the day of Frankie’s return, a German prisoner has escaped the camp via the river. Jonathan wants no part of the search party, but Emma presses Felix, a World War I vet, into it. Keyed-up Frankie, eager to prove himself, joins in, dragging along Billy, Ernie and another young man.
A moment of affection that Frankie and Billy share is witnessed, just before the violent event that disrupts their lives. Months later, when Frankie serves in the Air Force as a bombardier in Europe, he has plenty of time between missions to ponder that day. (Treuer’s description of the bombardier’s life and routine is terrific. Look for Kate Atkinson’s “A God in Ruins” in May if you want to read more fiction involving World War II aviators.)
Prudence, the title character, is first seen as a traumatized girl, painfully thin and speaking little, whom Felix carries into the Pines. Later, readers will encounter her as tougher than she first looked, with a powerful, protective instinct, using her own small body to safeguard a younger sister. “My tongue was the only weapon I had,” she writes in a long, aching letter, evocative of Molly Bloom’s soliloquy in its run-on nature, but 180 degrees different in tone.
She’s pretty, too, and men seek or demand her sexually. She navigates them as her needs and patience dictate, but longs for an unavailable one — no Ernie he. Treuer returns late in the novel to the Germans, introducing a POW who has remained in Minnesota, married an Ojibwe woman and carved out a new life through his cleverness, dexterity and moonshine still. A confrontation with a surprise visitor exposes some of the same questions as the stories of Prudence, Frankie and Billy: How truly does one know the person one loves? What do new revelations about a beloved’s past mean? What does one need to know?