Interview: Ojibwe author David Treuer discusses latest novel

Q: What was the origin of this novel? A: It had three points of origin, really. Well, four, if you count my secret agenda, which we'll get to in a little bit. First, we were walking behind the village my family is from on Leech Lake Reservation. I was with my father on a bluff over the lake there by the village, and he said, "Oh, did you know that there was a German prisoner of war camp right here?" At that time in my life, 9 or 10 years old, I was a World War II geek. I built World War II models, watched "Combat!" and "The Rat Patrol." It was probably my own way of puzzling out my father's life, him being a Holocaust survivor. I was very taken with the idea of a world war, something so big, so important, that touched down in a very direct way in the back yard of my mother's village. My father also told me that two German prisoners had escaped in a rowboat. They got downriver a bit before some farmers caught them. So that always stayed in my head.

Q: "Prudence" combines a lot of different elements. It's a mystery, it's a sort of Greek tragedy, it's a literary novel. Did you think of yourself as writing a hybrid?
A: Well, I try to write into my weaknesses. Which is to say that with every book, I think about what I have the hardest time doing, and then I try to write a book that makes me do what I'm worst at. (Laughs.) As a result, I've written a lot of different kinds of books. My first book was multivocal, with a multiple first-person cast of characters, sort of like (Louise) Erdrich. My second one was a linguistically driven, sort of atmospheric book, like (Cormac) McCarthy. My third was a metatextual, (Italo) Calvino-esque game of narratives. What I had never really mastered, or done, was a plot- and character-driven book in which there are situations that drive the characters to make mistake after mistake, then react to those mistakes, establishing a causal relationship between the scenes. The other thing I wanted to do with "Prudence" was ... well, being pretty with words comes to me more easily than other things. I think that's a virtue, but it can also be a vice, where you talk your way out of impossible situations in novels by writing well. So I wanted to make this novel, in terms of the language, as simple as it could be, and only as complicated as it needed to be. Some people might feel it's pared-down; I hope it feels organic.