A Complicated Kindness

Susan Merskey is freelance writer in London, Ontario.

“Half of our family, the better-looking half, is missing,” Nomi
Nickel says on the first page. Left alone with her father, Ray, she
spends her days piecing together the reasons why her mother, Trudie, and
sister, Natasha, had disappeared three years earlier, and trying to work
out what she can do to avoid a career at Happy Family Farms, a chicken
abattoir on the outskirts of East Village—not Manhattan, but a small
town in southern Manitoba. Her father seeks the comforts of his
religion. Nomi rebels—and how she rebels!

“We’re Mennonites,” she tells us. “As far as I know, we are the
most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you are a teenager.
Five hundred years ago in Europe a man called Menno Simons set off to do
his own peculiar religious thing…. Imagine the least well-adjusted kid
in your school starting a breakaway clique of people whose manifesto
includes a ban on the media, dancing, smoking, temperate climates,
movies, drinking, rock ’n’ roll, having sex for fun, swimming, going
to cities or staying up past nine o’clock. Thanks a lot, Menno.”

In this fast-paced novel, Nomi’s first-person narrative shifts easily
between the present and the past. She goes through the motions of
finishing high school, while flagrantly rebelling against all aspects of
the Mennonite traditions. Many aspects of her behaviour and language
reflect her desire to shock, even more than an “average” teenager
might do. But she also remembers the happy times with her mother and
sister, and the events that led them to flee the town.

A Complicated Kindness is Toews’s third novel. While I enjoyed it, I
found it disappointing in one respect: media reports and reviews had led
me to anticipate that we would learn more than we do about the
“true” Mennonite lifestyle as a counterpoint to Nomi’s reactions
against it.