A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews (2004)
- Abby Kernya
- Jun 7
- 3 min read
by Abbigale Kernya, for The 44 North
Managing Editor
Genre: Canadian Lit, Literary Fiction
Recommended Age: 16+ readers
Rating Scale
Educational value: 4/5
Positive message: 2/5
Positive role models: 2/5
Violence: 4/5
Sex: 3/5
Language: 1/5
Drinking, drugs, smoking: 5/5
Consumerism: 1/5
“...and I put on "All My Love" and watched the sun rise yet again and thought thank you Robert Plant for all your love but do you have anymore?”
—Miriam Toews, A Complicated Kindness
Life has been weird lately. It has been weird in the sense that sometimes I wake up and forget where I am. For a second each morning, I panic and try to find something familiar in the dark of my room to prove that I am here, and not somewhere else very far away. Growing up in a very small and isolated town, this feeling of displacement makes me who I am. I start to feel homesick when I find peace somewhere bigger than that town. From watching my friends grow up and go sideways, it’s sad to understand that when you’ve outgrown your community, there is nowhere else to turn but inside yourself.
With this quick glimpse into my current mindset, it should come as no surprise that Miriam Toews is making a double feature in reviews. Last issue, I reviewed Toews’ A Complicated Kindness which was my first introduction to this phenomenal Canadian author, and I was fortunate enough to study Towes’ A Complicated Kindness for a Canadian Literature class in university.
This novel follows Nomi and her father Ray—two remaining members of their family in a rural mennonite community after Nomi’s sister, Tash left the community, followed by her eccentric mother Trudie. Nomi, like her sister and mother, hates this town. She hates her uncle “The Mouth”, the town’s pastor who relishes on punishing and exploiting shame, she hates that her older sister left and that her mother didn’t take her secret passport with her when she left too. But, Nomi loves her father, who loves this town as much as he loves Nomi. When Nomi starts rebelling against her community—drinking, drugs, an older boyfriend, her place in this tiny mennonite community is put at risk.
A Complicated Kindness is a story that isn’t defined by one theme or the other. Rather, this novel is raw and vulnerable and proves Toews’ master of her craft. It rips up the boundaries of familial love and stitches it back together again and again and again. It highlights the suffocation of rural Canadian towns and in all of the pain and internal grief that exist alongside familial isolation, Towes writes a complicated sort of love that exists within it all.
I will never tire of Toews’ work. A part of me will always be in my hometown, and a part of me will always be in the characters Toews’ creates.
Love and attention exist on the same scale. You love what you mention, and as someone who, despite my teenage angst and rebellion against an environment I could not control, always finds a way to mention where I came from. For anyone who feels bigger than their hometown or anyone who struggles to find kindness even in the darkest of moments, please do yourself a favour and pick this book up.
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