A heartbreaking work of ... oh, wait

A Complicated Kindness - Miriam Toews (Counterpoint, 2004)

I've already told the story of how excited I was to finally track down this book (with the correct author and title), and I even managed to related to hockey, since that's what I do. What I haven't done is actually write about the experience of reading the book.

It was like one extended sucker punch. I felt so protective of Nomi, so much desire to somehow fix it for her. And I couldn't. I mean, obviously, since Nomi is a character, but still.

Let me back up. It's the 1970s, in Canada, in a small Mennonite community not that far from the US border. Nomi, at 16, lives with her dad, because her mom and sister each left within months of each other, about three years earlier. Both father and daughter are broken, utterly. Nomi deals like you might expect: she fantasizes about New York, smokes cigarettes and pot, listens to rock music, has an older boyfriend, shaves her head, gets in trouble at school.

But it's more than that. Toews elegantly handles what may actually be the easy part: showing how the community and its sensibility has damaged her family. While Nomi isn't the only teen who rebels, clearly, she is further adrift than the others. What makes Nomi's story so powerful is that she is so often unflinching in her assessment of how things have fallen apart, and yet the ways in which she tries, when she needs to, to spare herself or her father or her best friend the worst of it. To be cliche about it, she reminds me of nothing so much as a wounded animal that's still trying to be tough.

I didn't even bother trying to note remarkable and representative passages. There's something on virtually every page. At random:

...every time I looked at it I was reminded that I was, at that very moment, not bleeding from my face. And those are powerful words of hope, really.

Hmm. The problem here is that they are too long to reproduce here, and they lack context. But to give you the best sense of it, here Nomi explains the impossible decision her father would have faced had her mother stayed in town in the face of excommunication: shun his wife, or leave his faith? "He was stuck in the middle of a story with no good ending. He had the same disease I had." You're not sure if you should pray, since prayer has done so much harm already, but if you did pray, you would pray for a cure, a way for them to find a suitable ending to the story.