David Treuer is a literary shape-shifter, with each of his novels — including “Little” (1995), “The Hiawatha” (1999) and “The Translation of Dr Apelles: A Love Story” (2006) — using distinctly different forms and styles. True to form, his latest book, “Prudence,” is unlike all its predecessors: a tightly plotted hybrid fiction that combines elements of a mystery, a literary romance and a Greek tragedy.
But like all of Treuer’s work, “Prudence” explores the lives of Native American characters in and around reservations. (Treuer’s mother is affiliated with the Ojibwe tribe, also known as the Chippewa, from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota; his father is an Austrian Jew and a survivor of the Holocaust.)
“Prudence” focuses on Frankie Washburn, who returns to his ancestral home in rural Minnesota before heading off to serve in World War II. There he reconnects with his parents and a childhood friend, Billy, to whom he is ever more intimately drawn, even as a German soldier escapes from the local prisoner-of-war camp, leading to violence that scars all their lives for years to come.
Printers Row Journal recently caught up with Treuer for a phone interview from his home in Los Angeles, where he teaches creative writing at the University of Southern California. Here’s an edited transcript of our chat.
Q: What was the origin of this novel?
A: It had three points of origin, really. Well, four, if you count my secret agenda, which we’ll get to in a little bit. First, we were walking behind the village my family is from on Leech Lake Reservation. I was with my father on a bluff over the lake there by the village, and he said, “Oh, did you know that there was a German prisoner of war camp right here?” At that time in my life, 9 or 10 years old, I was a World War II geek. I built World War II models, watched “Combat!” and “The Rat Patrol.” It was probably my own way of puzzling out my father’s life, him being a Holocaust survivor. I was very taken with the idea of a world war, something so big, so important, that touched down in a very direct way in the back yard of my mother’s village. My father also told me that two German prisoners had escaped in a rowboat. They got downriver a bit before some farmers caught them. So that always stayed in my head.
Q: As it would.
A: Then sometime in my 20s, I was reading a biography of Hemingway, and there was a quote: “The first woman I ever pleasured was a half-breed Ojibwe girl named Prudence Bolton.”
Q: Ugh.
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A: I know, right? Of course we have to take his claim of pleasuring anybody with a grain of salt. The biographer did a little bit of digging, and found out that there was indeed a girl named Prudence Bolton who lived up near Traverse City at the time that Hemingway’s family vacationed there. All that the biographer found out, or felt important enough to relate, was that this girl Prudence and her lover drank strychnine together and died as a result. She was pregnant at the time. That’s all we know about Prudence. And it struck me then, in my 20s, that we know so much about Hemingway — we have book after book after book — but about the real-life Prudence Bolton, who became the model for the Prudence character in the Nick Adams stories, we know nothing. And to me, that always reflected the political reality of Indians in this country. As individuals, as citizens, we aren’t accorded much attention. As emblems of culture or something, of course people pay attention to that. But as human beings, we don’t get much ink. So that stayed in my head, too.
Q: And then?
A: And then, I heard a story from a teacher at Leech Lake that became the third thing. She said that in the ’60s, there was a huge problem with stray dogs. People would have dogs, and they would breed and overrun the village because people didn’t have money to spay the dogs. So the way they would control the dog population was that every spring, the men would get together and go out and shoot stray dogs. If you loved your dog, you kept it home that weekend, and if you didn’t …. So these two men were out shooting dogs. They saw a dog moving in the grass, and they shot it. But when they walked up to it, they realized it wasn’t a dog. It was two girls who had skipped school, and they shot and killed one of them. It was a tragic story, and in this very tight-knit village, it affected everyone’s lives — the victim’s family, the shooter’s family, everybody.
Q: Wow.
A: Right. So these three things were all in my head, but they were very separate. And then — I’m not sure how — they just kind of came together. They attached themselves to one another, and out came a novel called “Prudence,” a story about race and love in all its tragic forms, during (World War II).
Q: There’s one more element in the book — homophobia — that would have come from some other source, I guess.
A: Yes, that was the fourth thing. But I wasn’t interested in homophobia per se. I wasn’t trying to tell a heterosexual love story or a homosexual love story. I do both, of course, but what I was really interested in thinking about was: What kinds of things were permissible to what kinds of people? Who got to do what? Who got to shape their own lives, and who in turn were oftentimes forced into situations where their lives were shaped for them? You know, in America — in the world, really — there’s a fantasy of American Indians’ lives. It’s almost like they’re a ghost or a phantasm, rather than actual people. Some people think they apprehend Indians, but what they’re really apprehending are these phantasms or ghosts. We’re never really seen, never really. And so the nature of Billy’s love for Frankie — the taboo-ness of it, the sense that it’s the sin from which there’s no recovering — actually cuts through that phantom, that ghost, and you’re able to see Billy as a result of his love. Like Frankie, you’re able to see Billy as a human being, rather than as an Indian, or as a construct.
Q: When I read your book, David Guterson’s “Snow Falling on Cedars” came to mind, just because it has certain similar elements: an internment camp, a World War II time frame.
A: Oh, absolutely. I’m flattered that you thought of “Snow Falling on Cedars,” although it’s not the book I had in my head. When I was writing it, the author and style that really spoke to me was the Ian McEwan of “Atonement.” That’s probably the nearest literary relative of “Prudence.” The World War II time period is a huge element of the book, of course, but there’s also a sense of American Indian reservations as people and places out of time. After the frontier closed, people have just thought of us as suspended in a kind of amber of suffering — not really advancing, not really disappearing, kind of here but kind of not, as if we’re in some sort of purgatory. People sort of travel down, Dante-esque, and check on us, but our station never changes. And World War II was a way for me to explore and suggest how that’s not the case. We are living as much in modern times as anybody.
Q: You have a dual heritage of oppression on both sides of your family tree. Did you meditate on that as a child?
A: I didn’t like thinking about either side, because to me the story was one of loss — my father losing his entire family, except for a few relatives, everyone else murdered; my mother from generations of trauma and violence. So when I was a kid, it was a story about loss and subjugation. That’s how I understood it. But that was a failure of my own imagination. In “Prudence,” I try to explore how the characters try to use their heritage to secure their own survival — the survival of their hearts, the survival of their hope. It becomes a creative act to not die. As I got older, I saw this more and more in my parents. In my father’s case, it was impressive to me that after suffering a life of injustice, he was so committed to enacting justice, in small and large ways. My mother, after being treated so poorly by the law, has become a lawyer and a judge who really tries to use the law to do right.
Q: “Prudence” combines a lot of different elements. It’s a mystery, it’s a sort of Greek tragedy, it’s a literary novel. Did you think of yourself as writing a hybrid?
A: Well, I try to write into my weaknesses. Which is to say that with every book, I think about what I have the hardest time doing, and then I try to write a book that makes me do what I’m worst at. (Laughs.) As a result, I’ve written a lot of different kinds of books. My first book was multivocal, with a multiple first-person cast of characters, sort of like (Louise) Erdrich. My second one was a linguistically driven, sort of atmospheric book, like (Cormac) McCarthy. My third was a metatextual, (Italo) Calvino-esque game of narratives. What I had never really mastered, or done, was a plot- and character-driven book in which there are situations that drive the characters to make mistake after mistake, then react to those mistakes, establishing a causal relationship between the scenes. The other thing I wanted to do with “Prudence” was … well, being pretty with words comes to me more easily than other things. I think that’s a virtue, but it can also be a vice, where you talk your way out of impossible situations in novels by writing well. So I wanted to make this novel, in terms of the language, as simple as it could be, and only as complicated as it needed to be. Some people might feel it’s pared-down; I hope it feels organic.
Q: It’s another stylistic shift.
A: Absolutely. To me, the market encourages writers to brand themselves: “Oh, they write like this,” or “They write like that.” I don’t know that it serves me very well to confound that, but I don’t know how else to do it, because every book writes itself differently. I certainly don’t want to write the same novel over and over again, no matter how commercially successful it might be. It wouldn’t be any fun.
Q: You mentioned Erdrich. You share a number of things with her: cultural heritage, locations and so forth. Is it a problem for you that she has explored so much of the same territory for so many years?
A: Oh, no. She does what she does, and she does it beautifully. But when you get past the surface of tribal affiliation and geography, my writing and her writing — with the exception of maybe my first book — are very different. The magic in her books resides in her use of metaphor and simile. They’re not magical realist books, but there’s a kind of magic that attends what happens in her novels, a latent spirituality which informs the prose. But I think you’d have to look very hard to find that in “Prudence,” for example. “Prudence” is very much a realist book. I consciously avoid the lures of magic or culture as an organizing literary principle. I’m not saying it’s a shortcut for her, but for me it would be a too-easy way of signifying Indianness as spiritual or magical. (Sherman) Alexie does this too; it’s kind of a signature of a lot of Native writing. But when I really want to explore, say, Billy’s human core, to do that would make me my own worst enemy. I need people to see Billy as a fully realized human being with desires, and a heart, and an agenda, and living in a world where his love is illicit. Of all the characters and relationships in the book, the most fully realized love is the love that can’t be had.
Kevin Nance is a Chicago-based freelance writer and photographer. Follow him on Twitter @KevinNance1.
“Prudence”
By David Treuer, Riverhead, 259 pages, $27.95