A Complicated Kindness

Tonight I finished A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews. I thought If I picked a book at random, it would break me out of my reader's block. Unfortunately, it did not. It's not that this wasn't a good story. It was. A good story. I just think it would have been a better short story rather than a novel.

The novel is about Nomi, who lives in a Mennonite town. She is an outcast teenager in an outcast town, struggling to find her place in the world that doesn't even allow her to find a place in her small community. Her mother and sister left her with her dad when she was a young girl. Much of the book was devoted to her reminiscing about her life with her mom and sister before they skipped town. She is also struggling with what she wants to do with her life after high school. Tradition suggests that she will take a job at the local slaughter house and murder chickens for the rest of her life. This doesn't sound appealing to her, but neither does leaving her religion that she almost, but not quite, but by default, believes in.

Ultimately, her father also leaves. She finds out through letters left in her mother's underwear drawer that her mother had had an affair with her English teacher who had been badgering her to finish her final writing assignment. Everything she turned in denounced her religion and was returned to her with failing marks. Her graduation depended on this assignment. After her father left, she wrote her fourth or fifth, and final, writing project on how her teacher broke up their family. Forced her mom to be excomunnicated and therefore resulted in her leaving town.

Once her father leaves, she has plans to pack up the car he left her, sell the house he left her and live in New York City. We never find out if she does. She is always torn between living her life and serving her church.

And that's where the book ends, my friends. Very anticlimactic. I have asked Jim to pick my next book. Since I can't do it myself, perhaps he can choose something that interestes me. I really want to get started on the Jeffrey Deaver series that AK referred me to (she would be excommunicate me if I used her real name), however I cannot locate The Bone Collector for the life of me...

Onto the quote. I earmarked three pages of this book but this one is my favorite. Not quite as morose as the last quote. Perhaps I'm on the road to recovery :)

"She (Nomi's fourth grade teacher) said life was not a dream. And dancing was a sin. Now get off it and sit back down. It was the first time in my life that I had been aware of my own existance. It was the first time in my life I had realized that I was alive. And if I was alive, then I could die, and I mean forever. Forever dead. Not heaven, not eternal life on some other plane... just darkness, curtain, scene. Permanently. And that was the key to my new religion, I figured. That's why life is so fucking great. . . There's no other place to be. This world is good enough for you . . . Go ahead and love it."