“A Complicated Kindness” by Miriam Toews

A wise book reviewer once declared an immediate moratorium on Catcher in the Rye comparisons—in the making, or to come. Holden Caulfield is dead, I like to imagine the sagacious one announcing, and woe betide callow reviewers and perky marketing departments who resurrect him calling up the plethora of shallowish, stream-of-consciousness first-person narratives by disenfranchised and forlorn adolescent narrators whose considered opinion of the adult world is that it is artful, deceptive and hypocritical—in a word, phony. Naturally I shall not be making any such claims for Miriam Toews’s remarkably canny, unwittingly poignant, phony-detecting Nomi Nickel.

A Complicated Kindness, Toews’s third novel, is a marvellous, rowdy, street-smart yet cumulatively mournful disquisition on the myriad ways in which unhappy families achieve unhappiness in their own separately special ways. Indeed, the only undisputedly happy family in the pages of this book or, apparently, in the cantankerous environs of East Village, Manitoba, is the chicken evisceration plant, Happy Family Farms, off Highway No. 12, where Nomi confidently expects to spend her adult years, separating chicken heads from chicken bodies and generally repenting the prefix of her misspent youth. Meanwhile, 16-year-old Nomi Nickel lives alone with her father, her mother and older sister having departed lo these three years for greener or at least less repressive pastures than those offered by the Mennonite town.

East Village, as described by Nomi, is a severe and silent place brimming with the run-off of unexpressed feelings, presided over by the blessed triumvirate of Jesus, Menno Simons and her redoubtable Uncle Hans, and populated by an oil and water citizenry of the saved and the shunned. At the margins of the prairie town float the excommunicated ghost people who exist only as memory and exemplum, while the rest of the chronically obedient townsfolk—according to their teenage chronicler—cheerfully yearn for death’s release while remaining perturbed by the real world and vexed by its merry inconsistencies.

And, to make satire doubly sure, Toews heightens the comic impact of her sunshine sketches by “inventing” an artificial museum village, an “authentic” replica of East Village—a theme-park, movie set, low German, Brigadoon-type place—to which American tourists travel to observe the artless ways of an uncomplicated people in simpler times. Thus the East Village heritage village exists in the world solely to reproduce the idea of a town not existing in the world, and Toews expertly manipulates the ironies and idiocies that proliferate by way of this predicament.

“We’re Mennonites,” declares Nomi, “as far as I know, we are the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager.” Apparently resolved to wait out the Rapture in the harsh landscape of the prairies, Nomi’s co-religionists decry dancing, swearing, smoking, temperate climes, movies, drinking, rock ‘n’ roll, recreational sex, swimming, late hours and playing pool. Trouble with a capital “T” (which, we all know, rhymes with “P” and stands for Pool) comes by way of situational comedies, makeup, jewellery, worldly influence, self-confidence, the present tense, metaphors, communism, flippancy, Sunday lawn-mowing and the incipient extravagance of the town’s new crosswalk, the road to hell being paved with what Nomi names “pre-sins,” such as coloured appliances, touch-tone telephones and soft-top cars.

The town has firmly closed its bars, its bus depot, its train station and, according to Nomi, its collective mind, since the teachers follow a fundamentalist curriculum that blithely decries proven theories. Such a scathing indictment of fundamentalist belief is much more than merely comic (“the joke town in the joke province in the joke country”), for the reader swiftly discerns that it is grief rather than ridicule that impels much of Nomi’s assuredly wry and satiric rhetoric. How to account for grief, emptiness, loss and pain—hard, sweaty, 16-year-old pain—how to explain such human foibles as betrayal and deception and abandonment within a religious schema populated exclusively by the damned and the saved?

Even more than the town, Nomi’s peripatetic identity has been shaped by a dream of the perfect happy family, which, in her case, simply means her original family of four from which no one is missing, disappeared, exiled. Together for all eternity, she imagines her family islanded—and thereby physically incapable of absconding—like the Swiss Family Robinson, the movie version of which, incidentally, she is forbidden to watch. The perfect idea of her lost and misplaced family resonates through her narrative like an unprovable but beautifully imagined theorem in which her older sister, Natasha, is tender as well as tough, and her “obscenely, heartbreakingly hopeful” mother returns to take her place beside the husband who has been broken by her defection.

Nomi’s own relationship with her straight-laced, deadpan, yet oddly moving father is one of the most original aspects of Toews’s fervently original narrative. Ray Nickel has a penchant for driving around town all night, for taking coffee in Minnesota, and reorganizing what he quaintly calls the town’s nuisance grounds into well-orchestrated piles of rubbish, into garbage that “makes sense.” Eccentric and well-meaning, he is as lost and forlorn as his teenage daughter, with none of her rebellious pragmatism. Their conversations are rapid-fire funny, smart-aleck edgy, weighted by an undertow of nostalgia that mourns the future and anticipates the end of the novel. With her pubescent identity formed by the absences of her ever-scattering family (even the furniture keeps disappearing!), Nomi Nickel—she of the punningly self-revealing first name and worthless last name—begins to feel more and more like less and less. Isolated, as obscurely abandoned in woeful landscape as the girl in her favourite Christina’s World poster, Nomi is a latter-day Mennonite Maisie who knows only that she doesn’t know what she ought to know she knows. Of course, she also knows certain uncomplicated if necessarily obscure tenets of teenage lore:

Even a Menno sheltered from the world knows not to stick her tongue into the mouth of a boy who owns an Air Supply record. You might stick your tongue into the mouth of a boy who owned some Emerson, Lake and Palmer, but you would not date him on a regular basis, or openly.

Most frequently aimed at her repressive background and her oppressive town, Nomi’s irrepressible humour propels the narrative from breathlessly sad to gustily funny and back again so the reader often feels she is listening to a running joke with a tragic punchline. “Pretend you’ve already died and things will matter less,” writes Nomi at the end of her comically inflected self-improvement list. Such apparently nonchalant asides lend the impact of an Ondaatje-like Elimination Dance to the proceedings with the final variable being—as it inevitably must—pain.

Part secret diary, part homework assignment, confession, prayer, Nomi’s monologue is addressed to an unknown “you” whose identity comprises the unravelling of a secret. Writing against what she has been instructed to write about—a 1500-word essay that includes triggering point, climax, resolution—Nomi Nickel learns what a story is (the Mennonite story, the adolescent story, the family romance) by telling a story. Rebelliously ignoring the proprieties of narrative arc, she relates scenes and sketches, memories and imaginings, that are episodic and digressive but evocative of the fugitive sadness that hovers over small-town main streets and stubble fields and rainbow oil slicks, floating like the odour of dying chickens over the town when the wind is right.

Nomi Nickel misses her sister, yearns for her mother, worries over her father. With such a packed schedule she nevertheless finds time to bike desultorily all over town, stroll aimlessly down Main Street, and ride the highway slipstream behind vacationing RVs. In many ways A Complicated Kindness is about the art of aimlessness, about the myriad ways in which a girl, unencumbered by motive or motivation, punctuates her disorderly existence. With unerring accuracy Toews invents a childhood landscape of nick and bruise, of knock and scrape, lived out by a gangly kid already half-past adolescence.

With near flawless inflection, without pity or self-indulgence, Nomi tells her story, searching for the ending desired by God or narrative or the arcane requirements of her English teacher, who believes that stories arrive—inevitably, organically—at a preordained conclusion. Tender and brutal, histrionic, nonchalant, jubilant and mournful, pseudo-sophisticated and truly hip, wistful, goofy, and full of bravado, Nomi’s teenage scat fully claims our attention. Her exits and entrances, sidetracks and detours into our world are negotiated by humour, which is why the novel is so enjoyable, while the free-floating sadness of its adolescent narrator is what renders A Complicated Kindness so profoundly, poignantly, throat-clenchingly moving. ■

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, Toronto: Knopf Canada, 2004, hardcover, 246 pp, $29.95.

Méira Cook is a Winnipeg writer and critic. Her latest collection of poetry, Slovenly Love, has recently been published by Brick Books.