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A Complicated Kindness: A Novel, by Miriam Toews
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“Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,” Nomi Nickel tells us at the beginning of A Complicated Kindness. Left alone with her sad, peculiar father, her days are spent piecing together why her mother and sister have disappeared and contemplating her inevitable career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken slaughterhouse on the outskirts of East Village. Not the East Village in New York City where Nomi would prefer to live, but an oppressive town founded by Mennonites on the cold, flat plains of Manitoba, Canada.
This darkly funny novel is the world according to Nomi, a bewildered and wry sixteen-year-old trapped in a town governed by fundamentalist religion and in the shattered remains of a family it destroyed. In Nomi’s droll, refreshing voice, we're told the story of an eccentric, loving family that falls apart as each member lands on a collision course with the only community any of them have ever known. A work of fierce humor and tragedy by a writer who has taken the American market by storm, readers will find this searing, tender, comic testament to family love difficult to forget.
- Sales Rank: #227561 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-05
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.90" h x .80" w x 5.10" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 256 pages
From Publishers Weekly
A 16-year-old rebels against the conventions of her strict Mennonite community and tries to come to terms with the collapse of her family in this insightful, irreverent coming-of-age novel. In bleak rural Manitoba, Nomi longs for her older sister, Tash ("she was so earmarked for damnation it wasn't even funny"), and mother, Trudie, each of whom has recently fled fundamentalist Christianity and their town. Her gentle, uncommunicative father, Ray, isn't much of a sounding board as Nomi plunges into bittersweet memory and grapples with teenage life in a "kind of a cult with pretend connections to some normal earthly conventions." Once a "curious, hopeful child" Nomi now relies on biting humor as her life spins out of control—she stops attending school, shaves her head and wanders around in a marijuana-induced haze—while Ray sells off most of their furniture, escapes on all-night drives and increasingly withdraws into himself. Still, she and Ray are linked in a tender, if fragile, partnership as each slips into despair. Though the narration occasionally unravels into distracting stream of consciousness, the unsentimental prose and the poignant character interactions sustain reader interest. Bold, tender and intelligent, this is a clear-eyed exploration of belief and belonging, and the irresistible urge to escape both.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Sixteen-year-old Nomi Nichol is a Mennonite, which, she wryly observes, "is the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you're a teenager." Because Mennonites shun modern ways, Nomi's repressively fundamentalist community on the plains of Manitoba is a tourist attraction for Americans searching "for a glimpse backwards in time." Half of Nomi's family, "the better-looking half" as she puts it, is missing. Her older sister has fled the stifling strictures of their hometown, while her mother has also vanished after having been excommunicated by her own brother, the local minister, whom Nomi dubs "The Mouth of Darkness." That leaves the 16-year-old to look after her gentle, bewildered father and to deal with her own loneliness and persistent memories of how her family came undone. For Nomi, coping becomes an exercise in increasingly rebellious, sometimes self-destructive behavior, punctuated by pot-fuelled fantasies of escaping to New York to become a roadie for Lou Reed. Canadian author Toews, who grew up in a similar community, raises a number of fascinating, beautifully dramatized questions about the toll unquestioning faith can take on the human spirit. Her episodic, highly introspective first novel--part of an emerging subgenre of crossover adult books that might have been published as YA--maintains a careful balance between hilarity and heartbreak that most readers will find unforgettable. Michael Cart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
"Miriam Toews, the award winning Canadian author, embodies Nomi's voice with such an authentic and manic charm that it's hard not to fall in love with her... A Complicated Kindness captures the struggles of a family and its individuals in a fresh, wondrous style. Despite this complexity of family tensions, much of A Complicated Kindness is pleasantly plotless. The looseness of Nomi's worldview, the sometimes blurry nonfocus of it, the unexpected sideways humor, make this book the beautiful and bitter little masterpiece it is."
—The Believer
“Poignant....Bold, tender and intelligent, this is a clear-eyed exploration of belief and belonging, and the irresistible urge to escape both.”
—Publishers Weekly
“Wise, edgy, unforgettable, the heroine of Miriam Toews’s knockout novel is Canada’s next classic.”
—Globe and Mail Books section cover
“A Complicated Kindness is just that: funny and strange, spellbinding and heartbreaking, this novel is a complicated kindness from a terrifically talented writer.”
—Gail Anderson-Dargatz
“Why the compulsion to laugh so often and so heartily when reading A Complicated Kindness? That's the book's mystery and its miracle. Has any of our novelists ever married, so brilliantly, the funny — and I mean posture-damaging, shoulder-heaving, threaten- the- grip- of- gravity- on- recently- ingested- food brand of funny — and the desperately sad —that would be the three-ply- tissue, insufficient- to- the- day, who- knew- I- had- this- much- snot- in- me brand of sad? I don't think so.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Truly wonderful…. A Complicated Kindness is…one of the year's exuberant reads. Toews recreates the stultifying world of an exasperated Mennonite teenager in a small town where nothing happens with mesmerizing authenticity. . . . Toews seduces the reader with her tenderness, astute observation and piquant humour. But then she turns the laughs she’s engendered in the reader like a knife.”
—Toronto Star
“Right away we’re hooked on our narrator’s [Nomi’s] mournful smarts….A Complicated Kindness is affecting, impeccably written, and has real authority, but most of all it is immediate. You — as they say — are there….like waking up in a crazy Bible camp, or witnessing an adolescent tour guide tear off her uniform and make a break for the highway.”
—Quill & Quire
“...knockout novel. …There’s leave-taking in this book. But there’s wholeness, too. It is a joy.”
—Jennifer Wells, Toronto Star
“Now comes A Complicated Kindness, in which Toews’ deft hand combines aspects of her previous subjects — love, small-town politics, rigid religious parameters, depression, — and comes up with something completely new.”
—Leslie Beaton Hedley, Calgary Herald
“A Complicated Kindness struck me like a blow to the solar plexus. Toews, somewhat like Mordecai Richler, makes you feel the pain of her protagonist while elucidating the predicament of her people, always mixing a large dose of empathy with her iconoclastic sense of the ridiculous. When she’s funny, she’s wickedly so. But the book has a dark, disturbing side to it that grows stronger as the story progresses.”
—Pat Donnelly, The Gazette (Montreal)
“In novel full of original characters…Toews has created a feisty but appealing young heroine…. As an indictument against religious fundamentalism, A Complicated Kindness is timely. As a commentary on character it is fresh and inventive, and as storytelling it is first rate.”
—The London Free Press
“Toew’s offers up a wickedly funny new voice…. Nomi is wickedly funny, irreverent, intelligent and compassionate. Toews masteres the character’s voice and never allows her own to intrude."
—Fast Forward Weekly (Calgary)
“A Complicated Kindness works its way up to a powerful ending through the accumulation of anecdote and detail…. Toew’s sense of the absurd works brilliantly to expose the hypocrisy of fundamentalist kindness, a love in reality all too conditional…. A Complicated Kindness, at its core, is a depiction of the battle between hope and despair … yet along the way we are treated to an unforgettable summer with a heroine who loses everything but it s ultimately able to hold on to life, to a sense of herself, and to maintain her courage and optimism In the face of a world without any guaranteed happy endings.”
—Georgia Straight
“A Complicated Kindness…looks like a breakthrough…. It is narrated by a deastating ly funny and heartbreakingly bewildered young woman named Nomi.”
—The Bookseller (mcnallyrobinson.com)
“This book is as good as anything out there at the moment. But don’t take my word for it, take the word of your fellow citizens: It’s hit numerous Canadian bestseller lists…. [T]his is a well-crafted, witty, sardonic and ultimately sad look inside the world of Mennonites as they exist in East Village, Manitoba.”
—Ottawa Citizen
“From time to time…we are reminded of what we once saw in this cockamamie enterprise. Along comes book that stands out from the crowd. A Complicated Kindness is just such a book…. Miriam Toews of Winnipeg has delivered a new novel that has us all buzzing…. Ray is a wonderful character….Miriam Toews tells her sometimes harrowing, often very funny story with total confidence. You’ll car about Nomi and Ray and you won’t want it to end. I promise…. It’s a very different book, but A Complicated Kindness might be this year’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time.”
—University of Toronto Bookstore Review
“The narrative voice is so strong, it could carry the last eventful, least weird adolescence in the world and still be as transfixing…. Toew’s novel is a wonderfully acute, moving, warm, sceptical, frustrated portrait of fundamentalist religion…. The book is fascinating, and resonant, and inexorable…”
—Saturday’s Guardian (UK)
“A Complicated Kindness is a delight from beginning to end. The humour might be of the blackest sort ('People here just can't wait to die, it seems. It's the main event.'), but the cumulative effect is liberating and defiantly joyful.”
—Daily Mail
“In Miriam Toews' agreeably off-kilter novel, A Complicated Kindness, the sanguineous and sanguine are combined in Nomi Nickel.”
—TLS
"One of my favourite books so far this year is A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. ... (A) sweet, sad, hilarious novel ... The voice Miriam Toews has created for Nomi is utterly unique and absolutely convincing, and her adolescence in 'the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you're a teenager' is at times painfully funny, and at others just painful."
—Suzie Doore, Booksellers Choice, The Bookseller
"Nomi is a wonderful narrator ... Original and poignant, with exquisite tone."
—Juliet Fleming, Booksellers Choice, The Bookseller
"Canadian writer's UK debut, the story of a teenage girl growing up in Manitoba in an obscure religious sect, who narrates her story in a lovely voice, fresh and funny."
—Star Ratings, The Bookseller
Advance Praise for A Complicated Kindness:
"It is a complicated kindness indeed that gives us this book. Miriam Toews has written a novel shot through with aching sadness, the spectre of loss, and unexpected humor. You want to reach inside and save 16-year-old Nomi Nickel, send her the money for a plane ticket to New York, get her a cab to CBGB's on the Bowery and somehow introduce her to Lou Reed. It might seem an odd metaphor to use about someone who has authored such a vivid, anguished indictment of religious fundamentalism, but Miriam Toews writes like an angel."
—David Rakoff, author of Fraud
"The narrator of this novel, Nomi Nickel, is wonderful. She scrapes away the appearances in her small town and offers what she finds in a voice that is wry, vulnerable, sacrilegious and, best of all, devastatingly funny. This is Miriam Toews at her best."
—David Bergen, author of The Case of Lena S.
Praise for Miriam Toews:
“A Boy of Good Breeding broke unexpectedly through critical armour and caught me at the throat, made me laugh and weep with sad-sweet joy. . . . This novel is tonic for the spirit: a charming, deeply moving, unerringly human story, perfectly shaped and beautifully told.”
—The Globe and Mail
“The father’s narration she invented, so expressive and powerful in its understatement, comes across as entirely true in the telling. . . . Toews’ novelistic skills (the award-winning comic novels Summer of My Amazing Luck and A Boy of Good Breeding) are richly apparent in her evocative characterizations and in the deft drama of the narrative.”
—Toronto Star
“Delightfully humorous, subversive and naughtily clever. . . . Brava, Miriam Toews.”
—Prairie Fire
From the Hardcover edition.
Most helpful customer reviews
67 of 75 people found the following review helpful.
Life's hard questions
By Sarah McIntyre
I found this book fascinating. On first reading, this book seemed to be one teenager's long downward spiral into depression, interspersed with a few beautiful or humorous moments. But a shadowy glimpse of a some more complex themes drew me back to it for a second reading, where I was delighted to find the writing tight and full of well-chosen imagery and recurring themes.
The narrator, Nomi, writes near the beginning: "People here just can't wait to die, it seems. It's the main event. The only reason we're not all snuffed at birth is because that would reduce our suffering by a lifetime. My guidance counsellor has suggested to me that I change my attitude about this place and learn to love it. But I do, I told her. Oh, that's rich, she said. That's rich."
Nomi chafes against the inflexibility and lack of forgiveness in many members of her religious community, but as she struggles to understand the undercurrents which have driven her mother and elder sister into the void beyond the town, she begins to be able to tap into the honesty of her family to imagine something bigger and better than the only place she knows. "I have a problem with endings," she writes, and she cannot satisfy her English teacher by drawing her essays to a neat close. In the same way, she can't seem to accept her pastor uncle's neat package of rigid definitions explaining her existence, with no mysteries or forgiveness for weakness. When a nurse at the hospital criticises her invalid friend Lydia for being so needy, Nomi objects 'But isn't that what a hosp...(ital is for?)" When the church throws out a man for being unable to overcome alcoholism, the reader wants to ask, "But isn't that what a church community is for?" Nomi has an innate sense that something is fundamentally wrong with her environment. But she recognises kindness, too, "in the eyes of people when they look at you and don't know what to say." Her uncle, "The Mouth", always knows what to say, and it never fails to be irrelevant and discouraging. But she values those whose love and concern go beyond the limitations of their prescribed answers, who can only love her and feel confused, without lashing out because they feel threatened by her ragged search to unite her family and find healing.
Nomi's dad, Toews' best character, embodies this combination of deep love and confusion. He holds rigidly to the prescribed order of the community while gently falling apart with grief. Wonderfully complex, Ray wears a suit every day, even gardening, wins an award for perfect church attendance and listens to the radio hymn programme every night. But he spends nights secretly rearranging rubbish at the dump and slowly selling off the household furniture while letting his daughter see, with a sad and affectionate humour, that he doesn't know the answers.
Toews addresses two different kinds of nostalgia: the oppressive desire of The Mouth to cling to concrete vestiges of a past lifestyle, such as the town's windmill, and Nomi's fond remembrance of living people and experiences in the community that are both shared and uniquely hers. Even though I desperately wanted to tell her at the end of the book, "fly away!" I was moved by her dad's loyal attempt to encourage and empower her in the only way he knows how.
I think readers who are confident they know everything about God already and have set answers to life's questions will struggle with this book and find it irreverent. But I think other readers will be inspired by Nomi's quest in faith to find acceptance, forgiveness, joy and a love which extends beyond tidy definitions.
11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Nomi Nickel is a wickedly funny teen-aged anti-hero for the late twentieth century
By Bruce J. Wasser
"A Complicated Kindness" is a work of extreme adolescent alienation and unalloyed angst. No mere coming-of-age novel, its subject matter, a young woman's frustrated rage against the suffocating strictures of a small religious sect in an isolated rural Canadian community, is bound to upset its readers. Its author, Miriam Toews, has created a disenchanted, bewildered and embittered protagonist whose rebellion against her tightly-controlled environment rarely produces positive results. In fact, Nomi Nickel receives no solace, spiritual guidance or moral direction from her sequestered Mennonite community. The ironically named East Village is, to Nomi, death-in-life -- everywhere from its major industry, a slaughterhouse for chickens to its otherworldly preoccupation with damnation and the afterlife.
Against this repressive milieu, Nomi's mother and sister have fled precipitously, leaving her to fend for herself with her overmatched father. Her oldest sister, Tash, wantonly flouts convention, brazenly embracing a life-sytle that literally predetermines her excommunication from the church and town. More intriguing is the torment her mother, Trudie, experiences. Divided in loyalty between husband, family and faith, Trudie elects an understated subversion of Mennonite tyranny. Her inability to make decisions, her unspoken support of Tash's revolt and her agonizing ultimate decision to flee make her the quiet, invisible embodiment of discontent.
In the wake of their departure, Nomi and her befuddled father Ray make do poorly. The disappearance of the home's furniture eerily mirrors the absence of Trudie and Tash. Ray, a devoted sixth-grade teacher, adheres to the structure of Mennonite behaviors, even including wearing a coat and tie to a demolition derby which he attends with Nomi. His heart, torn asunder from conflicted loyalties and the tormented love he has for both his wife and his faith, cannot expand sufficiently to take care of his remaining daughter. Consequently, Nomi's life spirals inexorably out of control. Cigarettes, drugs and rock music cannot staunch her emotional bleeding. Limited by an understandable poor self-image and resisting social pressures for too enormous to battle alone, Nomi flounders. Even halfhearted attempts at sexual expression fail in bittersweet hopelessness.
Toews does not turn "A Complicated Kindness" into a sour polemic. Her novel crackles with humor; there simply isn't a page where Nomi's mordant sensibilities don't elicit laughter. Toews' tart observations about East Village compete with Nomi's descriptions of the malignant characters circulating through her life. Her uncle, the major domo of the church, is called The Mouth; his wife, Aunt Gonad. Nomi's friends are a rogue's gallery of teen-aged desperation -- from The Comb, East Village's accommodating pusher; Lydia, her emotionally devastated friend, hospitalized for depression; her feckless boyfriend Travis, whose callow cowardice belies his grandiose dreams.
Even though "A Complicated Kindness" is a dazzling success, it does have some inexplicable flaws. Nomi's character wanders from genuine adolescent authenticity to an unbelievable omniscient figure; the character often says things that Nobel laureates would be proud to utter. On numerous occasions, characters become caricatures, sapping the novel's gritty realism for cheap laughs and satirical overkill. Questions posed by the relationship between Ray and Trudie deserve better consideration than the pat answers "A Complicated Kindness" provides. It comes as no shock to the reader that there are several surprise twists at the novel's conclusion.
That being said, "A Complicated Kindness" is an extremely important book. Its honesty, insights and sensitivities reveal its author's enormous talents. In Nomi Nickel, Miriam Toews has created an adolescent anti-hero for the late twentieth century, one who could easily hold her own with Holden Caulfield.
9 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Growing up Mennonite
By Amazon Customer
People have compared the character of Nomi Nickel to Holden Caulfield, and it's easy to see why. "A Complicated Kindness" is a coming-of-age novel about a 16-year-old girl who lives in a strict Mennonite community. Nomi lives with her father, Ray: her mother and older sister ultimately abandoned their fundamentalist Christian town, leaving the rest of the family to fend for themselves. The relationship between Nomi and Ray is very fragile: they're both spinning out of control in different directions and it's hard for them to maintain a connection with each other. It's very obvious to Nomi that her life is screwed up. She longs to flee the town and travel to a fabulous and exciting place like New York City, but she's not sure if she has what it takes to make it on her own in the "real" world. Nomi experiences many of the usual aches and pains associated with growing up, but she also must deal with a lot of family and religious issues.
I thought this was an interesting book. Sometimes Nomi's long-winded tangents were a bit overdone and distracting, but author Miriam Toews did an excellent job of telling this story from a young girl's point of view. There are a lot of different themes in this book, but I personally found the whole religious aspect extremely interesting. Nomi is moved by the extraordinary acts of kindness demonstrated by the people in her town, but those people are also quick to excommunicate people from the church if they display signs of weakness or behave in a way that is considered "sinful." Isn't a church supposed to practice forgiveness and acceptance? Based on my personal experience, that isn't always the case, and I was able to relate to Nomi's observations about the blatant hypocrisy in her community.
"A Complicated Kindness" is an honest and insightful book: truly unique! I think there are some slight character flaws and the narration tends to drift off and become distracting at times, but the book is very original and will definitely hold the reader's interest. This story is bold, funny, and sentimental: a very enjoyable read.
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