Miriam Toews
A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews unfolds in the first-person voice of 16-year-old Nomi growing up in a Mennonite community in Canada. Throughout the course of the novel, Nomi exposes the cruelty and intransigence of the Mennonite community which shuns and excommunicates those unwilling to conform to its very stringent standards.
Nomi’s voice carries a novel in which very little else happens. She is intelligent, funny, irreverent, sarcastic, and highly critical of the abundant restrictions placed on the behavior, words, dress code, and activities of Mennonites. She describes in detail her daily routine, providing background information on her life and family along the way. We learn she lives alone with her father since first her older sister and then her mother are excommunicated and leave the community, their current whereabouts unknown.
Nomi is perceptive and has a heightened sense of the absurd. She is rebellious and confused. In between bouts of drinking, smoking, and doing drugs, she spends her days taking care of her father, defying her teachers, making out with her boyfriend, conducting imaginary conversations with her sister and mother, and talking back at authority figures, including her uncle, known as The Mouth. Nomi also has a compassionate, gentle side. She is devoted to her father and to her best friend hospitalized for illness. And she treats children, the elderly, and the bereaved with tenderness and sympathy.
Because very little happens in the novel, the descriptions of Nomi’s daily activities are repetitive and can get tedious. But her voice, which is engaging, warm, and funny goes a long way to sustaining interest in the novel.