Customer Reviews

A Boy of Good Breeding

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I first heard of Miriam Toews (pronounced Taves) when an excerpt from "A Boy of Good Breeding" was read on CBC Radio One while I was traveling in Canada recently. I was captivated and wound up purchasing the book. The story centers on the zany characters who live in fictional Algren, Manitoba, which at 1,500 people is in the running for Canada's smallest town, and its eccentric mayor is intent on keeping it that way until Canada Day (July 1), for reasons which I won't go into to avoid spoiling your fun. Toews has a gift for making ordinary people and their failings (teenage motherhood, poverty, chronic depression) interesting and sympathetic, without drowning in sentimentality. I was so hooked by this book that I purchased and read "Summer of my Amazing Luck," which won a Manitoba award in 1996. It too was amusing, warm and thoroughly enjoyable

I was recently in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and someone mentioned Miriam Toews as a good writer from the area. I really enjoyed the characters in this book: the eccentric mayor Hosea Funk, the young mother Knute Corea-McCloud and the wonderful mutt named Bill Quinn. The characters make bad, petty, heroic and hilarious decisions, but the writer is ultimately a friendly narrator who gets us to care and want to keep reading right to the end.

I was recently in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and someone mentioned Miriam Toews as a good writer from the area. I really enjoyed the characters in this book: the eccentric mayor Hosea Funk, the young mother Knute Corea-McCloud and the wonderful mutt named Bill Quinn. The characters make bad, petty, heroic and hilarious decisions, but the writer is ultimately a friendly narrator who gets us to care and want to keep reading right to the end.

I recently read Miriam Toews' "Swing Low", which is a memoir of her father. I picked up Boy of Good Breeding because I loved her writing style, which is casual, simple, and honest. Immediately, the characters grabbed me, and I could not put the book down. The people, who reflect real people - as I discovered as a result of reading the memoir - are beautifully portrayed, and their curious idiosynchracies made me chuckle. It's just a fun book, which is a pleasure to read, that leaves you with a good feeling.

After the success of Canadian author Toews' award winning "A Complicated Kindness," some of her earlier novels have been released in the U.S. While 1998's "A Boy of Good Breeding" may not be the perfect gem "Kindness" is, it's a captivating and very funny story of acceptance, love, and finding one's place in the world.

The novel focuses on two disparate characters, Knute McCloud, a young single mother having a tough time making it on her own in the city (Winnipeg), and Hosea Funk, the awkward, shy mayor of Algren, Canada's smallest town.

After losing her gas-pumping job for accidentally blowing up a motor home, then failing to seat anyone at her restaurant-hostess job, Knute moves back to Algren with her 4-year-old daughter, Summer Feelin' (S.F. for short), to help out after her father's heart attack. Tom, her father, is depressed and declining and her mother has embarked on manic house renovations, accompanied by stories of other people's personal disasters.

Hosea, Tom's best friend since boyhood, is preoccupied with a secret project - winning the prime minister's visit to celebrate Algren's designation as Canada's smallest town. To gain this distinction, the town's population must be 1,500 - one more and some other town may win, one less and Algren is demoted to village status.

Anticipating success, Hosea hires Knute as his assistant though he can't, at least at first, find much for her to do but rid the town of a recalcitrant mutt. His days are taken up with regulating the population - visiting the hospital to check on the maternity ward and the dying, tallying up those who move in and out, fretting.

Then Max - Summer Feelin's feckless father - comes back to town. And Hosea is on the brink of losing Lorna, the love of his 50-year-old life, because he daren't let her move in with him before the population count and he can't tell her why. Fact is, his mother, who never married, said on her deathbed that the PM was his father and Hosea is desperate to meet him.

This is a generous, big-hearted novel, made tart and funny by the very particular eccentricities of Toews' full-fleshed characters, and her considerable flair for comedy.

-- Portsmouth Herald

Winner of the McNally Robinson Book of the Year award and ably narrated by Ruth McIntosh, A Boy Of Good Breeding by Miriam Toews is an abridged audiobook set in a small Canadian town - a town so small that the Mayor schemes to keep the population at an even 1,500 to win a contest for being the smallest town in the nation. Young mother Knute and her four-year-old daughter have returned to town to escape the havoc of the big city, but when the mayor enlists Knute for his schemes, she must figure out how to keep the town population down when folks keep getting married, having babies, and more. The return of Knute's old boyfriend Max further complicates issues in this charming, down-home folksy story, originally broadcast on CBC radio. 3 CDs, 4 hours.

Hosea Funk is an eccentric middle aged mayor of Algren, the sometimes "smallest town in Canada," which he strives to keep that way to increase his chances of winning a contest which would result in a visit by the prime minister, who he's been told is his father. He flits in and out of the lives of the residents of the town, irritating some, like the town doctor, with his nosiness, necessary to keep his plan on track. Births, deaths, and decisions of townspeople to move into or out of the town limits could all affect the count of residents that he diligently keeps track of, much to the irritation and wonderment of those who knowingly and unknowingly provide him information. His never known to be promiscuous mother's decision at a dance to go off into the night with an out of town stranger, results in his sudden appearance after months spent in a baggy hot wool sweater. Hosea, whose grandparents are somehow able to, at least temporarily, swallow as having been left with his mother by a man on a horse, grapples with the decision of whether to commit to his girlfriend from the city, increasing the town's population and risking the loss of the contest, or to risk losing the girlfriend altogether. Subplots about his friend Tom's daughter, Knute, who comes to work the him, granddaughter, Summer Feelin', and the boyfriend who up and left the town and that of Tom's life after suffering a heart attack, round out the story. Mayor Hosea eventually makes all the right moves and wins at the most important thing, the game of life - a quick quirky read which feels a bit like Empire Falls.

I guess people have different reactions to Miriam Toews, but all of us pat ourselves on the back for picking up her fiction and reading it through despite the cultural uncertainty of being unsure about how to pronounce "Toews." Her current bestseller was so big that here in the USA her American publishers have brought back some earlier books, and this is the one I settled on, after some debate. The funny thing is that I still don't know who the boy of good breeding us. But maybe it's Hose, Hosea Funk, the mayor of the smallest town in Canada--Algren, Manitoba.

He's concerned because his mother, Euphemia Funk, once told him while she as dying that his dad was John Beart, the true Prime Minister of Canada (in the novel, that is) (the real Prime Minister, I have determined, is Stephen Harper, who was just on TV last night honoring the Canadian victims of the World Trade Center disaster). But check later, because they turn over like flapjacks there north of the border. Prime Minister Beart has made a vow to visit the smallest town in Canada, and so Funk will get his chance to meet his putative father.

He keeps obsessive track of every newcomer to town, as well as those dying, and those newborn (Veronica Epp has triplets, so to keep the population of the town at a steady 1500, Funk has to make sure three people leave or die!) This black comedy is just a backdrop, or better yet a "blackdrop," to the main story of Knute McCloud and her little daughter, the delightful Summer Feelin'. These two return to town to comfort Knute's father Tom as he feels poorly.

Miriam Toews is like Fannie Flagg but with more writing ability. Reading this book makes me want to move to a small town where, even if we don't have money, we care about each other. There maybe were too many characters with humorous names, as though the spirit of LIL ABNER were thriving in Manitoba, but quirky is as quirky does, and we should all have such problems.

The problem with CanLit is its overly self-conscious need to be "not American", with "uniquely" "Canadian" "settings" and "characters".

Some (most notably Carol Shields and Jane Urquhart, possibly Robertson Davies, occasionally Margaret Atwood) rise above the genre and write for an audience that goes beyond the coy quaintness so beloved of Canadian cultural conservators, and reach a broad readership who appreciate the universal themes in their work. The rest write for a limited audience in a style no more nourishing than most scifi, mysteries and romances. CanLit is just another species of genre fiction at its most government-subsidized mediocre.

A Boy of Good Breeding is an okay read, but it seemed more of a caricature than a story. If this author's other work genuinely warrants the accolades she has received (Governor General's award, Margaret Laurence award for Fiction, numerous Book of the Year awards), this book surely must be an anomaly, and I wonder why the author persisted with the project.

The narrator and the characters all seem to think this is a far funnier story than I thought it was, perhaps because nothing in the book really made me care about the people or the setting. A plus, perhaps, is that it wasn't set in Toronto for a change (which every Canadian knows is the true center of the universe) but for all that I didn't find the story or the thematic undercurrents all that interesting.

Surely this is a harmless read compared with W.P. Kinsella's overrated and arguably racist portrayals of the "hilarious" antics of those wacky inhabitants of Hobbema, Alberta, or Jack Hodgins' impenetrable magic realism, or W.D. Valgardson's self-absorbed personal angst, but even at that, I don't think the vast cultural investment in Canadian literature has, in the case of A Boy of Good Breeding, paid off.