Mind Picker: Fight Night

To be alive means full body contact with the absurd. Still, we can be happy. Even poor old Sisyphus could figure that much out. And that’s saying something. You might say that God is an absurd concept but faith in God’s goodness. . . I find joy in that. I find it inspiring. Oba! I’m rambling. But I brought up Romeo and Juliet for a reason. What was it. . . yes! My town. . . my hometown, and your Mom’s too. Hooooooooo. And Momo’s, of course. . . it had a similar tragedy, in my opinion. The church. . . all those men, all those Willit Brauns. . . prevented us from. . . well no, it was more than that . . . they took something from us. They took it from us. They stole it from us. It was. . . our tragedy! Which is our humanity. We need those things. We need tragedy, which is the need to love and the need. . . not just the need, the imperative, the human imperative. . . to experience joy. To find joy and to create joy. All through the night. The fight night.

With Fight Night Miriam Toews returns to familiar themes of surviving (and escaping from) a fundamentalist Mennonite community (even if the M word isn’t specifically used this time), and the suicide of those who can’t find the will to go on. Unlike her earlier novels, however, this one has an absurdist tone, with three female generations of a family living together and exchanging frank and farcical barbs. The main character, nine-year-old Swiv, is constantly exasperated by her mother’s and grandmother’s seemingly unserious approach to life, but as the novel unspools, it’s obvious that this is a family filled with love, fighting to survive and find meaning in this irrational world. The tone is relentlessly comedic, but I was amused throughout and ultimately touched. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Why is Mom so weird? I asked Grandma. She had fallen asleep. Weird? she said, after a minute. She put on her glasses. Well, let’s see. Is it because of Gord? I asked her. No, no, said Grandma. Well, maybe. Her hormones might be out of whack but that’s not really why she’s weird, as you say. Gord makes her happy! Really? I said. Very happy, said Grandma. As do you. Grandma moved her hand over my hair. It got caught in a massive tangle and she laughed. She called the tangle an elflock. Your mom is fighting on every front, said Grandma. Internally, externally. Eternally, I said. Yes, it would seem so, said Grandma. With your dad being gone and —

After being suspended from school (for taking King of the Castle too seriously; she’s a fighter, too), Swiv needs to spend the days with her aged and ailing grandmother while her late-term pregnant mother attends rehearsals for a play she’s starring in. Grandma’s makeshift lessons aren’t exactly school board approved (Math class could be answering the question: If it takes five years to kill a guy with prayer, and it takes six people a day to pray, then how many prayers of pissed off women praying every day for five years does it take to pray a guy to death?), and based on a suggestion from a Family Therapist, Swiv’s main “assignment” (and the conceit of the novel) is to write a letter to her recently runaway father, telling him everything that’s happening in the family’s lives. They have Editorial Meetings (where Swiv assigns letters for her mother and grandmother to write, too), and between all the storytelling about the old country, their experiences in modern day Toronto, and a surprise trip to visit some American cousins, Toews is able to, once again, shine a light on her own Winnipeg Mennonite childhood without ever mentioning either (beyond one reference to the Disraeli Bridge). This does and doesn’t feel like familiar territory from Toews and I was bemused by the following quote (from the pregnant Mom’s letter to her unborn child, “Gord”):

I remember reading an interview with a writer once and she said that she was writing against death, that the act of writing, or of storytelling, that every time she wrote a story I mean, she was working through her own death. She didn’t care about impermanence. She didn’t care if anybody read her stories. She just wanted to write them down, to get them out of her.

(It’s no coincidence that the grandmother’s first name, Elvira, is the same as Toews’ own mother's, and in the Acknowledgements at the end, Toews thanks her “for teaching me, ceaselessly, when to fight and how to love.”) And again, the main difference between this novel and some of Toews' earlier work is the relentlessly absurdist tone. Swiv, who is just a little girl, often feels like she’s the only adult in her house; rolling her eyes at her mother’s and grandmother’s discussions about sex and other body functions; repeating profanities back to the older women and sighing if they object (“I don’t know why saying bowel movement and stool is better than vag and piehole. It doesn’t matter what words you use in life, it’s not gonna prevent you from suffering.”) The following is a pretty typical scene that captures the overall tone:

Mom did these stretching exercises while we walked. She called them lunges. She pushed against buildings and light-posts like she was trying to knock them over. She said she was doing it to strengthen her uterus and her vaginal wall, and because that’s what actors do. Do it with me, Swiv! No! I said. I don’t have all that shit. You don’t have a uterus and a vaginal wall? she asked me. I walked away while she was pushing as hard as she could against the corner of Nova Era bakery because I don’t want to just stand beside her while she does weird things like I’m in support of it. She was almost lying down, and taking up the whole sidewalk, and people had to go all the way around her.

I can imagine that this tone (and some of the frank talk and profanity) might be a turnoff to some readers but I think that Toews carries it off. There’s power in recognising the absurdity of life, and often, it’s from that recognition that we find the strength to fight. I'd expect to see this again at award season.