Nomi Nickel is the narrator of Miriam Toews' new novel A Complicated Kindness. Her mother and her sister have both left the family, separately and without warning at the start of Toews' account of the life of an angsty 16 year old girl growing up in a Mennonite community. Why her mother and her sister have left becomes more clear as the novel goes on, and the lifestyle of the Mennonite community is described and decried in a way that only a rebellious teenager could.
A Complicated Kindness is good and bad, to put it simply. It is tempting to draw several comparisons, most notably to the perennial teen-angst book Catcher in the Rye, to which Ms. Toews owes much. Like Holden Caulfield, Nomi Nickel is aghast at a world she struggles to describe and explain. Indeed, the Mennonite community comes across as an oppressive one with rules calculated to instill guilt and fear in the residents. This includes excommunication from the town for continued offenses. Like Holden, Nomi is a quirky narrator. Often laugh-out-loud funny and thoroughly unreliable, her take on her world seems destined for tragedy.
A Complicated Kindness is good and bad, to put it simply. It is tempting to draw several comparisons, most notably to the perennial teen-angst book Catcher in the Rye, to which Ms. Toews owes much. Like Holden Caulfield, Nomi Nickel is aghast at a world she struggles to describe and explain. Indeed, the Mennonite community comes across as an oppressive one with rules calculated to instill guilt and fear in the residents. This includes excommunication from the town for continued offenses. Like Holden, Nomi is a quirky narrator. Often laugh-out-loud funny and thoroughly unreliable, her take on her world seems destined for tragedy.
Like Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson or The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, A Complicated Kindness is a narrative driven by a force of emotional conviction. Descriptions of people and events are conveyed through disjointed memories to paint a larger, more personal portrait. At the book's highpoints, these come across with the inscrutability of a koan, Detached segments within the same chapters provide an emotional resonance rather than a linear one. It is driven by a sequence of events which do ultimately lead to a climax of sorts, but they are quiet events marked more by their effects than by their actual occurrences. The Mennonite world is described with a lot of confusion and explanations for many rules are left unclear because, it seems Menno Simons, the religions founder, was not so big on explanation but very big on damnation.
Nomi's Uncle Hans, a.k.a. "The Mouth" is the religious leader of the town. His religious fervor is the cause of most of the Nickel family's troubles. Nomi's mother has trouble restraining the rebellious nature, a trait she shares with her brother but which manifests itself in different ways. This trait is also apparent in Nomi's sister, who contradicts and ridicules openly what can and cannot be done in the Mennonite world. Nomi's father is a confusing and really sweet person who's been beaten down by his environment and channels his rebelliousness through quirks like going to the dump and "organizing the garbage in a way [he] feels makes sense". One of the book's most satisfying and elegantly written sequences involves Nomi and her father, Ray, going to the dump to do just that. "The dump was a kind of department store for Ray, but even more like a holy cemetery where he could organize the abandoned dreams and wrecked things into families, in a way, that stayed together."
The Nickel family itself is presently disjointed, thus Nomi's mother and her sister are seen and heard only in reflection and never really reach a point of being fully-developed characters. Her mother is manifested as a ghost haunting Nomi's memories and serves a wonderful narrative purpose by doing so, but her sister is not much more than a stereotype of teenage rebellion and doesn't hold interest for very long. Nomi and Ray fight their battles separately but come home to each other at the end of every one. In a community where everyone is trying to make sure they do nothing that could sabotage their chances at Heaven and are therefore, according to Nomi, doing nothing at all, Nomi and Ray somehow seem like guardians of the garbage.
