New York Review of Books Review
THE POETICS OF DAMAGE permeates David Treuer's elegantly bitter fourth novel, "Prudence," which unites a distinctly modern sociopolitical perspective with a more old-fashioned moral rigor about the consequences of emotional cowardice, complicity and repression. On the evidence here, Treuer believes in bravery. Moreover, he believes that a lack of bravery isn't just sad, it's deeply destructive - and the destruction can't be undone. Cowardice can kill people. While there's much hope in this lyrical novel, as evidenced by the freedom with which it examines some of the more transgressive interstices of race, sexual orientation and gender, there's also an obdurate insistence on taking responsibility, particularly if one is a man. Treuer's perspective is bracingly tough. This author values honor. Who dares to take that kind of stance anymore? The principal terrain of Treuer's drama is a resort in the north woods of Minnesota, a lakeside clutch of cabins called the Pines, where certain events will mark the inner lives of its inhabitants, mostly during World War II and the decade that follows. The rustic camp is owned by a white family, the Washburns. Emma, the matriarch, is anxious and persnickety; her husband, Jonathan, is often grumpy; their son, Frankie, is handsome, smart and sensitive. Also at the Pines are two Native Americans: Felix, the caretaker, and Billy, who is Frankie's friend, childhood playmate and, eventually, secret lover. On a pivotal summer day when Frankie is home on a visit from Princeton, there is an accident with a gun and a Native American girl dies. The person responsible avoids owning up to it, and the burden of guilt is borne by another. The dead girl's teenage sister, the Prudence of the title, grows into a troubled, lost woman hopelessly in love with Frankie, who is in turn bound to her by a mix of admiration, bad faith and promises he isn't sure he can fulfill. It's a bad business, for which all the characters will pay a price. Treuer is particularly skilled at showing how a substantial lie in one area of a life can manifest as a distortion in another, apparently unrelated area - emotional numbness, self-destruction, cruelty, alcoholism. Without judgment, but also without blinking, he expertly vivisects characters who can't own up to the truth about themselves, showing how the unaddressed damage only deepens over time. Again and again, characters loop back to burnished memories of one another, recalling moments of ecstasy and demonstrations of heroism and grace (particularly masculine grace), but these loops always come to us tarnished by our awareness of what happened next. Promise is blighted by limitation; eros, when confined, begins to rot; shame poisons the emotional aquifer. The novel roams from the consciousness of one character to the next, touching down at pivotal moments, like a scrapbook of bad choices or the ruminations of some unseen character troubled by this spectacle of loss. Frankie, regarding his parents, sees that their fear and repression have "reduced the present and the future not to ash but to fog. A slow-creeping, heavy fog of sadness that hung over his childhood." Later he will only intermittently discern the wages of his own fear and repression. Felix is the sole character who remains true to his nature and thus causes no harm to others, but even he endures loss caused by dishonor. Very little can grow in this salted earth. With a writer as morally aware and questioning as Treuer, it seems fair to point out that "Prudence" goes a bit off true, as it were, when it comes to its female characters, who tend to be unbearable, dead or slowly dying. I sometimes felt as if I was reading the novelistic embodiment of Leslie Fiedler's essay "Come Back to the Raft Ag'in, Huck Honey!" in which he argues that much classic American literature revolves around the homoerotic bond between a white boy and an African-American or Native American boy who set off for adventures far away from confining women. Certain ideas don't surface here: that said women might be confined by the same culture, and/or that the boys' perception of those women might be influenced by their taboo desire, and/or (following Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick) that the boys - later men - and a woman might form a triangle in which the woman is both the medium and the beard for male-to-male desire. In a novel as thoughtful as this one, I wondered at the numerous passages characterizing Emma as an uptight, repressive shrew and Prudence as a ruined whore. The writing, so sure and glowing when it concerns the men, wobbles near the women. It's just a tincture, not anything that overwhelms the novel's many strengths, but I found myself wondering if honor, in this world, was conceived as a generally masculine strength, a manifestation of male responsibility and power. The men in the novel are held accountable for their own actions, for better or worse. The women, acted upon, aren't the agents of their own destinies, the keepers of their own secrets. In life, of course, this is hardly the case. In the end, though, I engage in this questioning from a foundation of admiration, from a sense that a writer with as strong a moral imagination as Treuer's is more than equipped to field it. "Prudence" hurts, and that hurt lingers. Very few novels take this much of a risk. STACEY D'ERASMO'S most recent novel is "Wonderland."