Book Review: A Complicated Kindness

by Miriam Toews, 1964-
256 pages, 1 edition (April 2004)
Knopf Canada, $29.95 CAD

This novel is about a young woman, Naomi Nickel, coming of age in a Mennonite Christian community, where she is not allowed to question religious mores. Her older sister has runaway and her mother is shortly excommunicated, leaving Naomi as the surrogate mother of her religiously faithful dad. How do you lovingly deal and emerge from such a tattered and repressed circumstance unbridled and sane?

This book won the 2004 Governor General's Award--Canada's national literary award. I am not criticising the book, but it is Mennonite-Canadian. Do we read it culturally, as representative of the Mennonite-Canadian culture, and the gap between generations of Mennonites? Is it autobiographical of Toew? Those are not questions i'm interested in. Rather, why are those culturally and anthropologically specific questions applied to the reading of Canadian literature written by visible minorities? Are all Canadians to relate to Toew's book, on a universal level? What is Toew's narrative strategy? Is it our general willingness to be receptive to her work? Why didn't comparable works by Joy Kogawa (1983), SKY Lee (1993), or Wayson Choy (1995) win the Governor General's Award 10-20+ years ago?

Generally, I recommend the book, for the quotable pearls of wisdom and ironic observations sprinkled throughout--especially the last five pages, which are very powerfully and poetically written, leaving gaps and spaces where angst and confession forbid expression. At times, the reading may become rather slow, and there occurs the common discrepancy of how a young teenager possesses the articulation, perspective, and sentiment of a well researched forty year old author.