'A Complicated Kindness': A Prairie Home Companion
By LIESL SCHILLINGER
Published: January 23, 2005
EVERY teenager is weird, or thinks he (or she) is. But some are weirder than others, and many of these come from families in which the parents, in spite of a decades-long head start, never managed to sand their own rough edges to fit into the puzzle of society. I recall, for example, the quiet, waiflike girl in my junior high school who had large teeth and horn-rimmed glasses. She liked to wear a terminally uncool T-shirt that read, in big juicy lettering, ''See What I Mean, Jelly Bean?'' Her parents were religious in a way the other grown-ups weren't eager to investigate, but they were decent people with interesting jobs and, despite their quirks, well liked by their colleagues. That is the mercy of growing up: weirdness matters less. Or should.
But there's a category of weirdness that's harder to outgrow, and that's when a child is profoundly mismatched with an entire social circle, like lovely Marilyn amid the freakish Munsters or serious Jane Eyre among the fatuous Reeds at Gateshead Hall. Such is the plight of Nomi, the 16-year-old narrator of Miriam Toews's brilliant third novel, ''A Complicated Kindness,'' a coming-of-age story that takes place in the late 1970's and early 1980's in East Village, a claustrophobic Mennonite community in rural Manitoba. The only business in town (not counting Jesus) is a factory where chickens are slaughtered, and the only pleasure is the anticipation of eternal rest. ''We are supposed to be cheerfully yearning for death,'' Nomi reflects wryly. ''We are the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you're a teenager.''
Told in Nomi's cocky, brooding voice, the novel is a series of flashbacks that revisit moments in the breakdown of her relationship with her family and of her family's relationship with the citizens of their town, who exclude sinners through a capricious process called shunning. ''If, say, your wife was shunned,'' Nomi explains, ''you weren't allowed to sit at the same table as her but if you put two tables together, with an inch between them, and then put a tablecloth over them, it would seem like you were at the same table, which would be nice, but you wouldn't be at the same table, so you wouldn't be breaking any rules.''
At the novel's outset, Nomi is living with her gentle, spacey, schoolteacher father, Ray, in a house that's slowly emptying as he sells off the furniture, piece by piece. Nomi and Ray have been abandoned by Nomi's mother, Trudie, who split, heartbroken, after Nomi's defiant older sister, Tash, suddenly left town. Trudie and Tash have been gone for three years, but Nomi and her Dad are still reeling. When Nomi's uncle -- a cold-hearted morals enforcer known as the Mouth -- gawps at their unfurnished rooms, she tells him, deadpan, ''We're cleaning up.'' As long as there's no solution, she might as well be part of the problem -- and anyway, Ray's decline can't easily be hidden. Lately, he's taken to sitting in the front yard in a yellow lawn chair, watching the highway.
When Tash left town, she tried to persuade Nomi to leave their mixed-up family too. ''Walk away,'' she commanded. ''What have I taught you?'' But Nomi was not, and is not, the type to cut and run. ''You taught me,'' she thinks to herself, ''that some people can leave and some can't and those who can will always be infinitely cooler than those who can't and I'm one of the ones who can't because you're one of the ones who did and there's this old guy in a wool suit sitting in an empty house who has no one but me now thank you very, very, very much.''
How does a child come up with her own ethical code when her role models include dazed parents, narrow-minded teachers and a zealot like the Mouth? Nomi writes her own rule book and selects her own society. Her best friend is a misfit named Lydia who wears knee socks and orthopedic shoes and a lime-green windbreaker in the heat of summer. Nomi likes her for ''the way she did the most unbelievably nerdy things without knowing it or if she did know it she didn't care at all.''
Nomi's boyfriend is a renegade named Travis who listens to reggae. He's a black sheep, but one who's somehow still in the civic fold. Introducing him, Nomi explains how his taste in music drew her to him. Even a sheltered Mennonite ''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. And then somehow Travis mentioned the name of Lou Reed without acting like a fawning dork about it and I knew then that I wanted to be his girlfriend.''
Nomi's hunger for life prevents the novel from being as bleak as her situation might suggest; her account of her trials is veined with a dark humor that glints with the glee of payback. She also has an artful way of weaving her anecdotes together. Early on, for example, she recalls the time she watched a strong wind liberate two black Mennonite dresses from a clothesline: ''flying around like large crazy birds way up in the sky near the water tower. . . . They were dancing all over the place, seriously shaking it in this crazy, free, beautiful way.'' Much later, when her father, near the breaking point, consoles himself by reciting, 'All our righteousnesses are as filthy rags . . . and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away,'' she completes the metaphor.
Nomi's history bears more than a passing resemblance to Toews's own, something she has acknowledged in interviews. She was raised as a Mennonite in a small Manitoba town by parents who were pious and loving but whose comparative liberalism meant they didn't fit in much better than Ray and Trudie. Toews's father was manic-depressive; the last words he spoke to her before he committed suicide were ''Nothing accomplished.'' Toews proved him wrong in a touching memoir, ''Swing Low: A Life,'' written in her version of his voice, and she does so again in this novel, which won the Governor General's Award in Canada.
''The absence of a genial mental atmosphere is not commonly recognized by children who have never known it,'' Samuel Butler wrote in ''The Way of All Flesh,'' his novel-cum-autobiography about his own suffocatingly devout upbringing. Like Butler, Toews got wise. There is beauty and compassion in her portrayal of Nomi's struggle, and there is also grudging sympathy for the people Nomi struggles to define herself against. Americans who come into our real town are either surprised or disappointed or both. They see some of us sitting on the curb smoking Sweet Caps, wearing tube tops, and they don't like it. They pay good money to see bonnets and aprons and horse-drawn wagons.
A tourist once came up to me and took a picture and said to her husband, now here's a priceless juxtaposition of old and new. They debated the idea of giving me some money, then concluded: no.
I speak English, I said. The artificial village and the chicken evisceration plant a few miles down the road are our main industries. On hot nights when the wind is right, the smell of blood and feathers tucks us in like an evil parent. There are no bars or visible exits. From ''A Complicated Kindness.''
Liesl Schillinger is an arts editor at The New Yorker and a regular contributor to the Book Review.