A Complicated Kindness Paperback – 6 September 2018

This novel is autobiographical and relates the narrator's growing up in a Mennonite community in Canada. Because I loved Toews' novel The Flying Troutmans and since I'm very interested in the psychology of living with strict religion, I bought this novel.It illustrates well the closed off world which the characters inhabit and the longing of the young (as well as the not so young) to break away from it. The relationships and their difficulties are drawn with care and tenderness.I found the book interesting, but all in all too long and not as touching as The Flying Troutmans. It was no page turner for me but I did not have a hard time finishing it either.Recommended if you are interested in religious sects and fundamentalism, also a great reminder of what it's like to be an adolescent.

"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.

A Complicated Kindness is a coming-of-age story set in a Canadian Mennonite community, a reclusive and devout Christian sect that's similar in its ways to the more familiar Amish, much to the fascination of the visiting tourists. Mennonites reject the modern world and all its temptations, instead living like 18th century farmers. But with TVs. Sometimes. The town's main industry is the chicken slaughter place and the town's youth look forward to illustrious careers slaughtering chickens before being called up to Heaven in the rapture.The novel is narrated by 16 year old Nomi in a wry, deadpan style that's very endearing and often funny, in a bittersweet kind of way. She definitely has a sharp sense of the comedic tragedy of her life- musing on the bemused-looking mural of Jesus on the high street, why did their religious founder Menno Simons name his following after his first name? Why does he love damnation so much but isn't bothered about explanation? How is moving one's body to music a sin? Nomi's mother and sister have both left the family, separately and suddenly- but probably for the same reasons. Nomi recalls them in chunks, their reasons for their departures become more and more clear, and sadly inevitable as she offers her memories up to the reader. Her missing family haunt her, but Nomi's father is unable to give up the religion that he loves and that has formed him and Nomi finds herself unable to give up on her father. She is trying her hardest to hold everything together in a ramshackle house by the highway that is falling apart, and with a father with increasingly erratic behaviour. Though previously a devout believer and follower of her religion, Nomi is just beginning to question the lifestyle she has been brought up in in a traditional rebellious angsty teen style.She and her band of disillusioned teen exiles spend their weekends dressing up as pioneers and churning butter in the mocked-up 'Ye Olden Times' dioramas for tourists, then drive around in pickup trucks, smoking dope, listening to Lou Reed and reading hipster novels and beat poetry. In many ways she's very much an ordinary teenager- boys, music her parents disapprove of, barely noticeable acts of rebellion. Nomi declares her survival strategy to be using “drugs and my imagination”- her greatest weapons against a town and a religion so desperate to get a foot in the door of Heaven that they forget completely to live.I really liked Nomi as a character- she was kidding herself about ever leaving, and she knew that but she lied to herself anyway was a way to cope. She's smart, honest and naturally inquiring, all the things that hardcore religious communities seek to crush, and it's painful to watch her struggle to understand that and then to force herself to live with it. I loved the pitiful but loving relationship she had with her father too, the bond and the burden. They didn't speak much, but understood one another entirely, even if the motives and attitudes were completely different. The scene where she helps him clean up the rubbish at the dump is heartbreaking- this religion seems to have crushed them both.Though it's not a particularly plot heavy book, it's a fascinating character study of Nomi and her religion, which will be pretty alien to UK readers. It's beautifully written with a mastery of language and image that I haven't seen in a long time. As it's not driven by action, the characters and their lives have to be compelling, as Nomi was a truly arresting narrator. It's a fast and engrossing read all about self-discovery and betrayal, family and escape.

Compelling insight into the impact on individuals of extreme religious upbringing.Well written. Convincing voice of a young person.

Good read