Customer Reviews

A Complicated Kindness

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(11)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

"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.

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.

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.

I don't care for most Canadian fiction but this is a notable exception. Toews' novel is the type of book you CAN put down, but I mean that in a good way!

Classically alienated teenager Nomi's story is told in a series of vignettes, and an in unusually slow pace at that. HOWEVER...there are such PILES of startling poetic images in every chapter that that a patient reader will get many rewards along the way.

It's a case of, do you enjoy a fast-paced, whirlwind of a novel or do you like a more subtle character study? This is the latter. If you prefer to savour rather than tear through a story, you'll like this a lot. Toews is very, very good (alternately funny and heartbreaking), and I can't imagine anybody else sustaining a series of vignettes nearly this well. This is one that creeps up on you; you'll still be thinking about it a week or two later!

Nomi, the first person narrator, is growing up in an isolated Mennonite community in Manitoba. They apparently drive cars and use electricity but are sufficiently distinctive that tourists come to photograph them. (She has great fun mocking the attitudes of the tourists.) There's a lot of interesting background information about Amish and Hutterite sects, which show remarkable parallels to Jewish orthodox and Hasidic groups.
Nomi recklessly defies all the rules and leads a life more untrammeled than she probably would have been able to do in her longed-for New York City. Her family ultimately breaks up because the rebellious ways of some of its members result in the community inflicting the punishment of "shunning" which causes them to have to choose between obeying the religious rules and maintaining contact with the shunned.
It challenged comparison with two other books I had recently read about girls growing up in religious groups circumscribed by religiously based restrictions. Those were Pearl Abrahams' "Romance Reader" and Kelly Kerney's "Born Again." All three are great books, and all are deliciously funny at some points. I thought Kerney's was the best. That's to some extent because Kerney is such a great prose writer, but also because her plot centers on the issue of the belief itself rather than just the restrictive social conventions it imposes. The central issue for Kerney is whether to believe or not believe. The central issue for Toews and Abrahams is whether to conform or not conform.

I have very mixed feelings about A Complicated Kindness. On the surface, it's an interesting concept. Nomi is a teenager in a small Mennonite town and is more a typical teenager than a typical Mennonite. I was interested in the conflict between modern influences and a culture living in the past.

It turned out to be not that interesting. If felt a bit like the movie Footloose to be honest. Nomi wants to be a regular teenager and dreams of escape but is constrained by the religious leaders and others in her church. The church ends up being more of a bit player than I would have liked and most of Nomi's story plays as a very typical bored teenager who dream sof escape and struggles with identity while regularly getting high.

This story was not all bad. Nomi's turn of phrase is sometimes very funny and her insights very interesting. Unfortunately, her style of speech is very Gilmore Girls and becomes tiring after awhile.

My favorite part of the book was the relationship between her mother and father and the deep love and sacrifice. I wish this had been expanded upon more.

So, thise was interesting concept that simply ends up being typical and a bit cointrived. I liked parts but don't recommend it. A lot will depend on how interesting you find Nomi's character as the whole book hinges on this.

It's hard to pan a book I set out to like, but despite the awards, this book does not deserve the listing among the Canadian greats. Set in a small Mennonite town on the Manitoba prairie, where all is controlled by the rigid expectations of the religious community, Nomi searches for meaning with typical adolescent angst, but some less than typical issues of family and faith.

Although Nomi offers a good take on the adolescent voice, she never transcends the dead, uncaring, whine. As a result I lost patience with the affected boredom after about chapter 2. Many wonderful books offer a child's or adolescent's look at life, but most offer a sense of the individual's strength, or grace or intellect to engage the reader. This book never allows you to see the strength or beauty of the repressed soul underneath.

At a book club meeting comprised of a mixed group of readers - some of us prairie girls, some Mennonite, most not, we could not understand the awards that had been give to this book. We wondered if it's major draw was the antagonism towards religious communities which is so prevalent in the modern media. There are many better books that deal with the issues of isolation, repression and hypocricy that can exist in these communities. The characters in this book are often cardboard stereotypes - the repressive religious leader, the philandering teacher, even the rebellious daughter and her shallow boyfriend.

More profound conversations and language could be heard in the boysroom of the local highschool. Although the intent of the author may be to reenact the tedium, hopelessness and stilted conversation of an isolated teenager's life - you need more than that to keep a reader occupied.

Narrated by a rebellious Mennonite teenager, Nomi Nickel, this funny, sad, wry, perfectly titled novel (but you have to read it all the way through to see why) takes place in a rural town in Southern Manitoba, where the Mennonites settled to preserve themselves from the corrupting world.

Nomi's elder sister, Tash, and mother, Trudie, have left home ("Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing.") and Nomi spends her days wondering why her family has disintegrated, pondering her own escape, and expecting to end up working at the chicken processing plant down the road.

The town, East Village, is a tourist destination; a place Americans come to gawk at the "simple life," exemplified in the museum town constructed at the edge of East Village. The real town, however, disappoints the tourists. Cars fill the streets, the inhabitants wear ordinary, if subdued, clothing, and enjoy the advantages of electricity and indoor plumbing.

But Nomi is also confused. "There were so many bizarre categories of things we couldn't do and things we could do and none of it has ever made any sense to me at all." They could watch "Batman," but not "Swiss Family Robinson," could play golf, but no pretend games. Life is meant to be a sober, austere preparation for eternal heaven after death.

"There's not a lot of interest in the present tense here. And it's only slightly disconcerting that everyone's related. If a Mennonite couple divorces do they still get to be cousins? Oh yeah, hilarious. Tash once said to my mom: Oh, so it's wrong to move any part of one's body in time to music but it's perfectly okay to penetrate members of one's extended family? My mother told her not to be silly."

Nomi's mother was a high-spirited woman with a worldly yen, who took her religion seriously. Her inner turmoil remained mostly hidden until Tash began openly and angrily to turn her back on the church. Supporting her, protecting her and sometimes taking her part brought Trudie into open conflict with the church, personified by her brother. "It was like being the sister of Moammar Gaddafi or Joseph Stalin." "The Mouth of Darkness," as Tash and Nomi call him, rules with an iron hand, excommunicating any who disagree with him. Excommunication is akin to living death in this community. Everyone, including members of his or her own immediate family, shuns the excommunicated. They are called ghosts.

Ray, Nomi's father, is a quiet, devout man. He always wears a jacket and tie and sits outside in the evenings in a lawn chair watching the night sky. He writes reminders to himself of things to do the next day and leaves them on his shoes before he goes to bed. He's a man who likes his routine and, says Nomi, frequently, he and Trudie loved each other madly.

So why did she leave? Tash and Trudie, though they didn't leave together or at the same time, have been gone three years when the novel opens. Nomi and Ray are still waiting for them to return. Before they left Nomi was a pious, contented child in growing fear of her sister's salvation. Since then she has become as skeptical and irreverent as Tash; openly flouting "The Mouth's" dictates. She smokes, uses weed and alcohol, stays out till all hours, skips school and has a boyfriend. She hasn't yet tried sex, but is planning to.

Bewildered and wounded, she takes refuge in sarcasm and cherishes tender moments and tenets of family life from her past. She and Ray maintain a loving connection, but they don't talk much. Ray has taken to selling off the furniture and going on long, late-night drives.

The narrative has a realistic, stream-of-consciousness quality as Nomi reflects on her family, trying to trace the path that brought them to this pass. Early on, her high-school teacher, urging her to complete her assignments tells her "that essays and stories generally come, organically, to a preordained ending that is quite out of the writer's control." But Nomi is not convinced. "I don't know about that. I feel that there are so many [endings] to choose from."

This sense of possibility, and the inherent fear of failure that choice carries with it, is a recurring theme. The church limits choice but confers belonging and security. Freedom is not merely a temptation, but an act of will. Under all the sassy humor, these are the issues Nomi grapples with, and those that will, in the end, define her.

Toews, award-winning Canadian author of a memoir about her manic-depressive Mennonite father, "Swing Low: a Life," has written two other wry, humorous and warm-hearted novels, "Summer of My Amazing Luck," and "A Boy of Good Breeding." Her writing is rhythmic and lyrical, her characters captivating, and the portrayal of a strict religious community is complex and absorbing.

Nomi Nickel feels trapped in her small, Mennonite Manitoba town. East Village, Manitoba, combines strict religiosity with all of the career opportunities inherent in a chicken-rendering plant, and has brought nothing but strife to Nomi and her family. At the book's start Nomi's mother and sister have already run off, escaping the strictures of East Village. Nomi spends much of her time dreaming about reuniting with her mother and sister, reminiscing about the past, and trying to escape the strictures of East Village. Toewes does a brilliant job of narrating as Nomi, a troubled teenager. Much of Nomi's resistence seems to come from her perverse sense of humor, which sometimes distracts the reader from just how tragic her situation is. Nomi's is a world with few opportunities and no real solutions, and the novel is certainly a cautionary statement on the dangers of ideology without thought.