"Irma Voth" by Miriam Toews

Irma (19, married at 18 to Jorge who's not around) lives in a Mennonite community near/in Mexico. Her father's strict. Jorge is strict when it suits him. Her father's parents were killed in Europe. He escaped to Canada. She has a sister, Aggie, 14, who wants to live with her. When Irma was 13 she thought she was dead. She was sent to a doctor. Her mother told her "Just begin". A film director, Diego, arrives, asking her to be an interpreter. He knows that the Mennonites are against images, but he wants to record their culture before it disappears.

Jorge returns briefly. There's tension between them. She's agreed to do cooking for the film crew. She offers Wilson sex. He agrees - he has a terminal illness. She saves drugged Aggie from the film crew. Her father beats her all the same. The father threatens to disrupt the filming.

Jorge's been stashing drugs for someone. She sells the drugs. She and Aggie leave in the film-crew's van, dropping into their mother. She's just had a child! The mother tells them to take the baby with them. They leave for the airport, bluffing their way to Mexico. At a big public protest (clowns and unicycles) she befriends Naomi who's with friends - students. Aggie's had her first period. They're run out of money. The students have heard of the film director. They're given a room in the hotel of one of Naomi's relations in exchange for wprk. They settle down. Aggie goes to school. Irma starts looking at artistic opportunities. She tells Aggie that she's told their father that their sister Katie was leaving, which led to their father killing Katie. She watches Diego's film. In a Q&A session after he reveals that Jorge was killed (by someone asking for his drugs back). Irma feels guilty that she's caused 2 deaths. She flies back to her village, watches her parents' house from a distance, then goes in and says hello.

I like "Waving her arms like a shipwrecked survivor", but I think I've seen it before

Other reviews

• Rachel Shabi
• Susana Olague Trapani (Irma and Aggie’s relationship infuses Irma Voth with the heart needed to supplement Toews’ pithy and clever prose. Not only dealing with parent-child relationships, Toews also offers a touching and fully developed sisterhood, filled with cutting remarks, petty arguments, the turning of a blind eye when necessary and, most importantly, deep affection. ... Irma Voth is not without fault. It is difficult to believe that Irma and Aggie would not encounter harassment or questionable characters once Irma removes Aggie from her father’s reach and they move into the larger world. Yet, in this book, it seems that everyone outside the Mennonite community is nothing but kind and helpful.)
• Kirkus Reviews (A literary novel marked by charm, wit and an original approach to language, weakened by polarized characters and a shift from gritty to soft-centered. )

"Fight Night" by Miriam Toews

An audio book.

Narrator Swiv (female) lives with a pregnant mother who goes to acting rehearsals, and an ailing grandma. They live in Canada? Swiv's been expelled from school. Her father is away. They watch "Call the midwife". Mother and grandma are disinhibited about sex. When they can't tell from the ultrasound scan the baby's gender (the sex organs obscured), Swiv thinks the baby's better off without sex organs. She thinks that adults are busy so they have to look happy and sad at the same time. Swiv wants everyone to be normal. Mother tells Swiv that she should have more friends, or at least one friend. Swiv thinks grandma isn't paying attention because she's too preoccupied with going insane. Suicide and madness are in the family tree.

While Swiv and grandma are on a plane waiting to take off for San Francisco, grandma explains with perfect clarity that Swiv's mother had gone to Albania for 4 months to do a film. Her passport had been taken, she stayed with some of the cast in a lighthouse, the drinking water made her ill, she did her own stunts, and had an affair. The baby she's expecting might be her lover's, which is why Swiv's father left and why her mother's feeling so guilty. In California they visit nephews. We learn that Swiv is about 100 months old (i.e. not yet 9).

Grandma breaks her arm dancing at an old people's home. The return to Canada, go a hospital where grandma goes into acute care. When Swiv's mother visits she goes into labour. Swiv takes the baby to Grandma.

It's full of jokes and funny anecdotes, aided by the cranky old grandma who gets into conversation with anyone. But the California part of the book didn't interest me.

Other reviews

• Stephanie Merritt ( the motifs that are reworked through all her books are largely autobiographical. She draws on her cultural background – growing up in a strict Mennonite community in rural Canada – as well as her family history: both her father and her sister killed themselves after long battles with mental illness ... Elvira shares a name and part of her biography with the author’s own mother; in the novel, she too has lost a husband and a daughter to suicide and escaped a repressive small-town religious community with an authoritarian leader. ... Her narrative takes the form of an extended letter to her unnamed father, who has recently left with no indication of any intention to return. As a framing device it’s not entirely convincing; for long swaths of the story the form appears to be forgotten, so that when the second person suddenly intrudes the effect can be jarring. ... Some of Swiv’s precocity can be explained by the weight of responsibility she carries, though at times she displays a knowingness that doesn’t quite ring true in a nine-year-old and occasionally tips into archness ... In less skilled hands, the emotional double whammy of the novel’s ending could easily come across as trite.)
• Dina Nayeri

"A complicated kindness" by Miriam Toews

An audio book.

Nomi (her PoV), 16, is living with her father Ray. Her mother Trudy left a while after sister Tash (3 years older than Nomi) did, having shown signs of mental distress. They belong(ed) to a fundamentalist religion in a town of fundamentalists. Nomi thinks a lot about Trudy, puzzling over memories. She has a boyfriend Travis. She goes on the pill, smokes, drinks, misses school. She had overheard Tash tell their mother that she didn't believe (no surprise) and their mother reply that she didn't believe either. We later learn that she'd been excommunicated. Perhaps she left so that the family could stay. She didn't take her passport.

Her dad leaves - so they she could stay? The house is all hers, plus the car.

A page-turner - not for the plot but for the many interesting anecdotes and details - e.g.

• She asks her father what her first word was. He said "don't". He asks what her second word was. He couldn't remember. She thought that he should have made something up - "go" for example.
• "It's hard to grieve in a town where everything is God's will."
• "staring at coupons as if they were showing signs of coming out of a long coma."

Other reviews

• Zoe Williams
• Patrick T Reardon

"The Flying Troutmans" by Miriam Toews (faber and faber, 2009)

"Troutman" is the family name. They're in flight rather than fighting, but "Flying" is also a euphemism for f***ing - as a family they're a bit of a pain. The main character, Hattie, has problems that she summarises on p.25- "I was so tired. I'd been dumped for Buddha. I had jet lag. I'd just put my sister into a psych ward. I was suddenly responsible for two kids, one who hardly talked and one who couldn't stop, with no clue how to take care of either of them". Her solution is take the kids on the road, justifying it by a lie.

One of those children is Thebes, an 11 year old girl who says things like "We're all mostly white nerds ... with minor physical and emotional flaws that do not require medication but do brand us as losers in the bigger picture" (p.21), and hands Hattie pieces of paper with stuff on it like "In Scrabble you've got a certain amount of time to make sense of your randomly picked letters, to make words, not necessarily to know what they mean, but to score points, to bluff, to bingo, to win./ What is this? I asked her./ Grandma's last words, she said. I write them down at least once a week so I don't forget them." (p.63). When Thebes is silent for a while, Hattie waits for her "to talk, to spring into action, to illuminate the room with some Theban fact or question or comment or pronouncement or definition or something" (p.199).

Logan, the son, is 15. He carves words into dashboards, etc, wanders from one basketball court to another. On p.242 there's a "Zen and the art of basketball" moment - he focuses entirely on the shot, always expects the next one to go in. When Logan's headphones break, it's a disaster

Thebes popped her head out of the van and said that if he wanted to have a funeral for them in the field, she could lead it, no charge, "Amazing Grace," the works. I yanked her back inside and told her to leave him alone. She took a picture of him, boy grieving, with her disposable underwater camera. She and I gave him some time along with his headphones (p.108)

Hattie's 6 years younger than her sister, Min, and rather too friendly with male loners that they meet. The kids keep her out of trouble. She is missing a boyfriend she'd left in Paris.

It was my turn for a CD. I put in some Lucinda Williams and Logan said nooooooooooooooo. He covered his face with his hands. Please, no, please, he said. I'm begging you. C'mon, I said, it's not country. Check out the lyrics. I tossed the CD case into his lap. He screamed and tossed it back at me like it was a shitty diaper. Just put on your headphones then. I said. I'm playing it. I might play it on my next turn too. I've got a broken heart (p.87)

They're in search of Cherkis, Min's ex-husband, the father of the 2 children - " Min had once told me that Cherkis's life's work had been, maybe still was, to create the perfect level of pixel breakdown without compromising the essence of the image" (p.67). On p.251 Hattie easily finds a lost child's parent. She finds Cherkis nearly as easily in the end.

Throughout the book there are many entertaining flashbacks about the looney things Min did. Just about everybody runs away some time, and the book ends as Min might be running away again because of Hattie's lies.

Thebes is unbelievable, but once one accepts that the author will do anything for a good story, the book's entertaining. As an example of the intrusions, on p.258 Logan suddenly gets permission to sledgehammer a sidewalk, as if to give Hattie the chance to think "Smashing the obvious and well-worn paths that lead us from one place to another"

Other reviews

• Jane Shilling (Telegraph) (this tiresome and manipulative novel)
• Tom de Haven (New York Times) (Improbable characters flash in and flash out, signifying nothing ... Caricatures are bad enough, but most of the ones drawn here seem to be out of date by 40 or 50 years. ... The vernacular narrative, which had spark, specificity and rueful wit throughout the novel’s opening chapters, becomes sloppy and gabbling, like a blog hastily banged out. ... nothing about “The Flying Troutmans” feels authentic, not the characters and not their psychology, and certainly not the American landscape they blast through, leaving dust in the slipstream, but very little else.)
• Emily Donaldson (Quill and Quire) (This is a book that builds its complexity so subtly and imperceptibly that the inevitable sense of deep engagement feels almost like sleight of hand.)
• Beth Daley (The Manchester Review) (It’s a very nice read – witty, lively, full of intriguing characters – but the end is just too, well, too convenient, too forgiving.)
• Lee Thomas (Toews draws her four central characters ... with brilliant dialogue, spare description, and a vibrant humor that makes the horrifying somehow bearable. ... a book so enchanting it’s hard to tear your eyes away from the page)