Review

A Complicated Kindness

By Miriam Toews

Published by Faber

Toews' assured, funny and moving novel is set in a Canadian Mennonite community.

Nomi’s mother and sister have both left East Village, unable to stand the stifling air of repression that pervades the town. She is now looking after her bemused father Ray, and going through the motions of finishing high school, but in reality the pair of them are barely coping with the break-up of their family.

Nomi for the most part abandons going to school altogether, opting instead to hang around with her boyfriend Travis and take drugs. Meanwhile, Ray, blinking behind his thick spectacles, whiles away the evenings driving around town or tidying up the town dump; he is also gradually selling off all the furniture.

Nomi is a great narrator, kicking against the restraints the leaders of the community tries to impose on her with all the might of her teenage sarcasm. She is very funny, but beneath her sardonic humour lies confusion and uncertainty. As the house empties of furniture, Nomi’s behaviour becomes more erratic, but her love for her father remains undiminished even as her relationship with her boyfriend crumbles away.

Through Nomi, Toews describes the anachronistic paradox of a Mennonite community in modern Canada, whose strict religious laws, including the threat of excommunication and shunning, come into conflict with the late-twentieth-century lifestyles of the young. As Nomi says, ‘what was and what wasn’t allowed was so random and absurd, it was like playing hide-and-seek with two-year-olds.’

Reviewed by James Smith, Booktrust website editor

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