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.