Jul. 14, 2004 - Issue #456: Metallica

Print Culture

Raves for Toews

Miriam Toews’s third novel A Complicated Kindness, the story of a 16-year-old girl in a southern Manitoba Mennonite community in 1982, brought me readerly joy in a way I hadn’t felt before. The way the characters spoke and interacted, their cast of mind, was so overwhelmingly familiar that I found myself trembling with excitement. And yet, I questioned my ability to respond to the book critically. That the book was brilliantly written was, I thought, unassailable, but was my enthusiasm for the world Toews explored simply due to the fact that I’m Mennonite? Was its universality as compelling as its specificity? Thankfully, the fact that square Ontario-types at the Globe and Mail and other media outlets “got it” on some level and have been heaping praise upon it has helped me make peace with the excellence of this novel. I suffer, you see, from the classic Canadian affliction: the desperate need for the affirmation of my betters at the cultural centre. More interestingly, perhaps, the thrill of ethnic and generational self-recognition I received from A Complicated Kindness helped me feel something I had previously only understood intellectually: good writing is not only rooted in place but in a community in time. Fiction located in a generic urban anywhere will feel empty and superficial, and won’t respond well to seismic testing. When I read Toews I also experienced the excitement generations of Canadians of different ethnic or racial backgrounds felt when they saw themselves in print—Catherine Parr Traill’s English Upper Canada, A.M. Klein’s Jewish Montreal, Joy Kogawa’s Japanese southern Alberta, Maria Campbell’s Métis northern Saskatchewan—and recognized that their community’s experience was worth writing about. A Complicated Kindness, for all this, is far more than an “ethnic” novel. Set in East Village, Manitoba, it is acerbically narrated by teenager Naomi Nickel, a teenager experimenting with intoxication and boys, all the while grappling with the disappearance of her mother and older sister three years before. She lives with her mentally ill father, an inspirational schoolteacher who at home is distant, virtually speechless, staring out the living room window for hours at a time. In Nickel’s mind, her homogenous Mennonite hometown has a similar disconnection. It thinks of itself as a town where simple, Christian living is practiced in the community (a Kris Kristofferson 8-track is disposed of like toxic waste by a church elder) and on display in the town’s popular museum of traditional Mennonite life, while people lead lives full of repressed desires and gaping silences. With subversive humour and poignant deadpan, Toews’s novel explores the age-old alienation of youth, coupled with the lonely exclusion from a wider community whose convictions ring hollow. It’s Nickel’s voice that immediately grabs you. Like David Bergen’s The Case of Lena S. (2002), Toews’s novel captures the herky-jerky swing between ennui and compulsiveness of adolescence. “After the driving lesson we went into Travis’s basement bedroom to drink the wine and listen to Cheap Trick again. He showed me his Joy of Sex book including charcoal sketches of elated, naked hippies with armpit hair. We read that armpits can be extremely erotic. He had a bargain tub of Vicks Vaseline on the top shelf of his closet. And a gerbil named Soul who was on antibiotics for a tail infection. He asked me if I was cold and I said no, I just shiver sometimes.” And then there is Naomi’s agony that hipness and satisfaction are elsewhere, like the Chicago graffiti rolling through town on railway cars, shaded with the understanding that conformity and banality lie in wait everywhere. The flavour of Toews’s novel is strongly reminiscent of Richard Van Camp’s The Lesser Blessed (1996), an angst-addled and viciously humourous tale of youth in the Dogrib community of Rae-Edzo, NWT. In fact, the use of self-deprecating irony and humour to examine racial and ethnic identities has a long history in Canadian writing. Think of powerful works like Tomson Highway’s The Rez Sisters, Sky Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café, or Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers. They juxtapose incongruous perspectives that serve to challenge stereotypical assumptions. David Adams Richards’s dreary, technically troubled recent novel, River of the Brokenhearted (2003), full of endlessly tortured and helplessly abused people in small-town Miramichi, shows the perils of the opposite fictional strategy. Toews has used her writing to delve into unusual social spaces since the outset of her career. Her award-winning first novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck (1996), took readers at a crazy comic pace through the world of single welfare mothers, while her second, A Boy of Good Breeding (1998), was a tall tale about a Manitoba town’s search for glory. Her incredibly moving memoir of her father, Swing Low (2000), gave words to her largely silent father by casting the narrative in his voice. Like this memoir, A Complicated Kindness displays new timbres in Toews’s writing. There are the eruptions of punning and slapstick comedy and black humour found in her earlier novels, but there is a new subtlety, a new conviction to hold the darkness and the light together in her hand that is lovely to behold. V

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