Prudence by David Treuer

What could he say to any of them when nothing anyone could say could make time flow in the other direction: back from England to Florida to Texas; back east to Montgomery, and then straight north, following the Mississippi, a fat brown worm in Louisiana, as it shrank, shed tributaries, spit earth and trees back up on the banks, shed cities like a snake shaking of fleas, till the river ran clear and cool, weeds waving in the current, shallow enough for herons to wade along its edges in search of minnows; and Frankie touched down at the Pines. And then the shot would move back up the barrel of the shotgun and the gun would fall to his side, useless, ridiculous, silly, really, some silly toy his father bought to have in the house. And then Billy's hand would reach out to take it from him.

On a summer day at a northern Minnesota resort called the Pines, everyone is anxiously awaiting the arrival of Frankie, the owner's son, from Princeton: his mother Emma, the Ojibwe caretaker Felix, and especially Billy, the Ojibwe boy with whom Frankie has had an extended and clandestine summer affair. When Frankie arrives, he has several of his louchest Princeton buddies in tow, much to Billy's chagrin. Instead of falling into each other's arms, Billy and Frankie are whisked upon a mission of machismo, hoping to hunt down a German prisoner who has recently escaped from the prison camp across the river from the Pines. When Frankie shoots at a noise in the brush, he ends up killing not the German but a young girl running with her older sister from their Indian School in North Dakota to the Canadian border. This act of sudden violence forces the young lovers apart and splinters the lives of everyone involved: Frankie, Billy, Felix, and especially Prudence, the sister left alive.

This is the first fiction book I've read by Treuer, who wrote Native American Fiction: A User's Manual and The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee. As one might expect, Treuer's evocation of Ojibwe life is particularly rich and complex; his depiction of Felix, Billy, and others shows how enmeshed the lives of whites and indigenous people in northern Minnesota are. Themes of indigeneity are there, and powerful--the school that Prudence and her sister Grace escape, for one, and the comparative poverty of Felix's status compared to the resort where he is caretaker--but they feel naturalistic and unforced. One gets to understand the way race and settler colonialism can exist on a plane just beneath the dynamics of the moment: Billy and Frankie's hidden love, or the mounting hysteria of World War II.

Now, I'm a sucker for the story that goes "A sudden act of surprising violence changes everything." But the two thirds of Prudence that follow the killing felt misshaping and disappointing, to me. Billy takes credit for the shot to save Frankie--not that anyone much notices or cares, with the war going on, that an indigenous girl has been killed--and the two are sundered. Frankie goes off to train as a bombardier (these sections are so meticulously rendered they made me wonder if they are drawn from experience!), desperate for the war to distract him from his guilt and longing for Billy. Prudence sticks around, growing up to be a depressed drunk who turns to sex to assuage her grief. Believing Billy to be her sister's killer, she treasures the idea that Frankie will come back to marry her--a promise made, obviously, from guilt. Prudence's ironic and mistaken attachment to Frankie is one of the novel's most interesting elements, but the novel struggles to develop it, as it does Prudence herself. Another plotline, in which a European Jew arrives in Minnesota to hunt down a Nazi from the camp seems like it will connect, but never does, not in a meaningful way.

All of that's to say that Prudence has some terrific, arresting parts. But as a whole, it seems to lack a center: is this a story about Frankie, or Billy, or Prudence? The novel's heart, actually, seems to be--or perhaps ought to have been--Felix, the kind and studious caretaker whose grief from the previous world war provides the tragic backdrop to the modern story. In a novel about the way that grief and guilt destroy, a man who turns his grief into a quiet but steady living really stands out.

Native American Fiction: A User's Manual by David Treuer

Somewhere along the way--in the eighteenth century perhaps--Indians became associated with a very specific set of virtues.  And then, at a later point Indians were perceived as having vanished.  Or, if we hadn't disappeared entirely, we were no longer perceived as being pure.  We were diluted by blood and experience.  This, in the imagination, happens during the start of the reservation period (because of the qualities of pride and independence and...)  Somehow the virtues have remained, though we are gone.  And Indians and Indianness persist as ghosts persist: as hovering presences that can be evoked and appealed to, linked to life but separate from it, no longer a reality, or in reality.  We became but an essence.

In one essay in his book Native American Fiction: A User's Manual, David Treuer tells an anecdote about signing books in Finland, where a man, dressed in jeans and a vest with a long black braid, asked him to sign a picture of himself, writing "To Lonely Wolf."  "Don't you mean Lone Wolf," Treuer asked, but no--his spiritual name was Lonely Wolf.  A parody of a Native American name, but sported with deadly earnestness.

I'm teaching a class in the spring on contemporary Native American fiction, and I'm pretty anxious about it.  The anxiety centers around being a figure like Lonely Wolf: a person whose sympathy with Native Americans, or the Native Americans he has imagined, precludes actually hearing or listening to the Native Americans of reality.  A person who likes the idea of Native America, but who's never met a real Native American.  As a teacher, it's a hard triangulation to make.  Students expect expertise, and while I'm certainly an expert in literature and reading it, my expertise in Native American issues is as shrunken as any white person's necessarily is.  But I think these texts, and these people, are worth listening to, as is only infrequently done--Treuer calls it "Indian silence"--and so I have to put myself in the position of a listener, too.  No braids, no vest.

Treuer's set of essays acts as a kind of manifesto about how to read Native fiction.  He talks about several authors and texts I'm planning on reading, like James Welch's Fools Crow and Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine.  One of his central arguments is that these novels are about culture, but they are not culture, even though that's the way we often read them, as tangible an artifact as a ribbon shirt or a piece of black-and-white Pueblo pottery.  I have trouble with the rigidity of that distinction.  Are no novels "culture" or is this a special distinction for novels by Native authors?  Culture, as Treuer describes, is embodied in the lifeways of his Ojibwe community, distinct from the literature that an Ojibwe person (like Erdrich) might reproduce.  But is that because the novel is necessarily a European form, and if so, how does that square with Treuer's own dismissal of the question of authenticity?  But Treuer's certainly right when he says that the novels are not allowed to be literature, a right which Anglo-American authors have enjoyed for centuries.  For this reason he even expresses doubt whether "Native American fiction" is a meaningful category at all (a bold move, given the title of the book).

In the process, Treuer dissects a lot of cant about Native American qualities in these novels.  Critics claim that Love Medicine employs the "polyvocality" of Ojibwe myth, but Ojibwe myths, as Treuer shows, are narratively straightforward.  The language of Fools Crow is modeled less on Blackfeet language than on the epic similes of The Odyssey.  The myth-poems of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony have more in common with modern notions of poetry than Pueblo myths, which are not poetry at all.  (Though, one might argue, they're not really prose either.)  In all these cases, what the novels possess is not culture but a desire for culture, a longing for authentic indigenous experiences, constructed with the familiar tools of the American fiction tradition.  Though I'm not sure Treuer intended it, there's something tragic in that, a suggestion that, perhaps unknowingly, these authors are reaching for something with tools that can never accomplish it.  Treuer's essays end up being a kind of deconstructivist project.

Treuer warns that it might seem he's giving these novels "harsh treatment," but frequently stops to remind us that he has great admiration and love for Erdrich, Welch, Silko, etc.  He only wants them to be read honestly.  Except when it comes to Sherman Alexie, whose work he rips apart with the precision of a butcher working on a carcass.  He compares Alexie's Reservation Blues to a famous hoax novel, The Education of Little Tree, which was a popular memoir of a Native child until it was exposed as having been written by a white KKK leader.  In that essay he wants to undermine popular ideas of authenticity, and reclaim Little Tree as an "Indian novel" because it shares many qualities with other imaginative renditions of Indianness.  But the opposite is also true: Alexie's work, as described by Treuer, is chock-full of bad stereotypes and nonsense about racial purity.  I've never actually read Alexie, but Treuer's account confirmed a lot of what I've intuited--plus, it's always fun to read a good takedown.