Prudence

David Treuer’s novel Prudence is set in rural Minnesota, at a small lakeside resort called the Pines on the edge of the Leech Lake reservation, where Treuer was born and raised. The book is set in 1942, just before the main character Frankie is set to go off to war to fight for his country as a bombardier. Frankie's return sparks a wave of bad memories from his adolescence, particularly the tension surrounding his unstated sexual orientation. Frankie is very distant from his father, Jonathon, because of this, while Frankie's chronically anxious mother, Emma, is more concerned with operating the resort. Also at the resort are Felix and Billy, both Native American. An older man, Felix is a caretaker who has taught Frankie all he knows about fishing and hunting. Billy is Frankie's childhood best friend and eventual lover.

As the novel begins, Frankie is returning home from Princeton to visit his family at the Pines. He is making a short trip home before he joins the army as a bombardier, and he wants to see his family and close friends before departing.

It just so happens that Frankie has come home on the same day that a search party has been sent out around Leech Lake for an escaped German prisoner of war. The camp is located across the lake, and many of the local townspeople, the men, in particular, have joined the search to track him down. Felix, Billy, Frankie, and a few of Frankie's friends also visiting from Princeton join the search, spending the day tromping through the woods looking for the escaped German.



Unfortunately, the day ends in catastrophe. During the search, a gun goes off, and a young Native American girl is killed by accident in the woods from the ricocheting bullet. The aftermath of this incident for Frankie and the dead girl's sister Prudence forms the emotional crux of the novel, as Prudence grows into a woman.

Prudence, then a teenager, grows up into a troubled young woman. She is haunted not only by her sister’s death but by her devoted love for Frankie, whom she hopes will love her back the way she desires, though she suspects he never will. The novel’s central theme is repression and its disingenuous representations of self. Frankie reflects on the way his parent's repression hangs over them like “a fog,” and it takes him a large chunk of the novel to admit his own repressed feelings to himself.

Other tensions include the power dynamics between white families (Frankie and his parents) and Native American characters. The only character in the book that is truly himself is Felix, the elderly caretaker, but even he struggles to gain traction in the novel due to dishonor in his community.



The central premise of the book is the winding together of Frankie and Prudence's lives around a central point, from the death of Prudence's sister into the future in the decade after 1942. The novel is told using frequent flashbacks, meditations, and shifting narrators, almost like a scrapbook of stories that piece together the winding plot.

An American author of Ojibwe and Austrian Jewish descent, David Treuer has published seven novels, including Little, Hiawatha, Rez Life, and others. His most recent book is The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present, published in 2019. He has received a Minnesota Book Award, been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and received an NACF Literature Fellowship. Deeply committed to his Ojibwe heritage, Treuer frequently peoples his novels with Ojibwe characters. He and his brother are working on a dictionary of Ojibwe language, in the hopes of preserving the grammar structure, and vocabulary for generations to come.