Each day leading up to the April 16 announcement of the Minnesota Book Awards, and in collaboration with community editors from the award-winning Saint Paul Almanac, we highlight one of the thirty-two finalists. Today we feature 2016 Novel & Short Story finalist:
Prudence by David Treuer
Published by Riverhead Books/Penguin
Category Sponsor: Education Minnesota
On a sweltering day in August 1942, Frankie Washburn returns to his family’s rustic Minnesota resort for one last visit before he joins the war as a bombardier, headed for the darkened skies over Europe. Awaiting him at the Pines are those he’s about to leave behind: his hovering mother; the distant father to whom he’s been a disappointment; the Indian caretaker who’s been more of a father to him than his own; and Billy, the childhood friend who over the years has become something much more intimate. But before the homecoming can be celebrated, the search for a German soldier, escaped from the POW camp across the river, explodes in a shocking act of violence, with consequences that will reverberate years into the future.
Author Bio:
David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. The author of three previous novels and two books of nonfiction, he has also written for The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Slate, and The Washington Post, among others. Treuer won the 1996 Minnesota Book Award for Little (Graywolf Press), and the 2013 Minnesota Book Award for Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through Reservation Life (Grove/Atlantic). He has a Ph.D. in anthropology and divides his time between living in Minnesota and teaching literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California.
David Treuer is on Twitter.
An Excerpt from Prudence:
Everyone remembers that day in August 1951 when the Jew arrived on the reservation.
In later years the Indians would sometimes wonder idly at the strange fact of his arrival, and his departure on the first train to Minneapolis the next morning. But the Jew was forgotten that day, until then a day like any other; hot and muggy and filled mostly with the thrum of wind-plucked power lines and the crack of grasshoppers lifting out of the sand and spent grass. The Jew stepped off the train and into the thoughts of the villagers, and he exited the station and their minds just as quickly, because an hour or two after the train groaned to a stop, one of the hotel maids found Prudence’s body in the room above the Wigwam Bar. And then there was that. Her poor young body arched and twisted and frozen in the August heat. And Prudence’s baby, too, whom no one saw alive, not even Prudence, in its little cathedral of blood. And there was that, too.
Not long after the maid found her, the sheriff had come. After him the coroner. Then Felix and Billy, separately. Soon, everyone in the village, Indian and white and in between, had gathered outside the hotel, and in front of the hardware store, and the grocer’s, on the platform that served the depot, and in the Wigwam itself. Since the village didn’t consist of more than those small stores and the hundred or so Indians and loggers whose houses clustered around the railroad tracks, the gathering didn’t look like much.
It was, as dramatic events go, quiet. There wasn’t much fuss when her body was loaded onto a canvas stretcher, covered with a white sheet, and handed down the narrow stairs like a ham in paper. The passage of Prudence’s body from the apartment above the Wigwam was performed with the solemnity of the viaticum. No one raised a fuss, even though she was twenty-three and pregnant and alone, and now dead. It just wasn’t that kind of village. And northern Minnesota wasn’t that kind of place. Besides, it was 1951 and there was a war on. The world was much too big to worry itself about a dead Indian girl. No one wondered, really, what had happened or why, in the way people who aren’t accustomed to being wondered about discover they dislike thinking about themselves. It was too hot, in any event, to do more than sit and shake one’s head. No. It was much better not to think of Prudence at all.
Reviews:
“At once both blunt and hushed in tone, wielding a sledgehammer while walking on tiptoes….each new page breeds both familiarity and — partly because of that familiarity — the capacity to surprise… By taking us one step backward for every two steps forward, Treuer doesn’t just unravel the plot we might expect; he prompts us to interrogate the assumptions—racial, sexual and otherwise—that build up those expectations in the first place.” —NPR
“In Prudence, natural-born storyteller David Treuer spins a vivid, sorrowful tale… [A] master craftsman of evocative scenes…Prudence is evidence that Treuer’s literary powers continue to grow. He knows people and goes to places foreign to most American writers, and his stories deeply honor “the unremembered,” to whom he dedicates this book.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune
“So intricately plotted, so filled with strong characters, it should win major awards.” —St. Paul Pioneer Press
“Powerful, truthful, compelling. A modern literary novel set in WWII Minnesota, in and around an Indian reservation. The story of false dreams and hopes, this is a literary novel with stories woven like a tapestry and building throughout the book. Not uplifting, but truth often is not.”—Minnesota Book Awards preliminary round judge
“David Treuer’s novel Prudence is a wondrous and mesmerizing narrative–intricate, seductive and wholly gratifying.” —Toni Morrison
“Treuer’s novel captures in careful, lustrous narrative, a time in which passion was restrained in public yet extravagantly expressed in writing. He not only sets his book in the early 20th century, he channels authors of that era— the writers he sees as his stylistic cousins.” —MinnPost
Watch:
SELCO executive director Ann Hutton reviews Prudence by David Treuer:
Listen:
Fresh Air on NPR: Prisoners Of War And Ojibwe Reservation Make Unlikely Neighbors In ‘Prudence’
The evening features a Preface Reception with complimentary passed wine and cash bar, author meet-and-greet, book sales and signing; the Awards Ceremony with live music, celebrity presenters, artisan cheese plates and breads, complimentary wine and lemonade, with emcee Stephanie Curtis of MPR; and the Epilogue After-Party with complimentary champagne, sumptuous desserts, and additional live music. Tickets now on sale, or click here for more information.
Today’s winner: Peter and Judith Ries. (We’ll be in touch via email, and arrange getting the book to you!)
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