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Miriam Toews won the 2004 Governor-General's Award for fiction for her third novel, A Complicated Kindness. While that book was fresh and charming, I found it also a bit glib: snappy one-liners that helped balance the stultifying aspects of Mennonite life. With The Flying Troutmans, Toews opens her world, producing a book of risk and range without losing any of the wit and warmth that made a bestseller of the earlier book.

• The Flying Troutmans, by Miriam Toews, Knopf Canada, 274 pages, $32

Eleven-year-old aspiring lyricists in Manitoba don't usually CC their songs to Hollywood mogul David Geffen. But (Theodora) Thebes Troutman doesn't belong to "usually." Neither does Logan, her 15-year-old punk-poet and basketball-addict brother. Their mother, Min, hospitalized with the worst and deepest psychotic break of her young life, is also a stranger to any "usually" but her own. If you're looking for usually, The Flying Troutmans is not your book.

Its people, however, do exist in life. In significant numbers. And they vibrantly and powerfully exist in Toews's new novel. Their journey is proffered by The Flying Troutmans' narrator, Hattie, sister to Min, returned to Canada from a defunct love affair with a Frenchman (and with notions of becoming Parisian) after receiving an urgent cry for help in a collect telephone call from her young niece.

The trio visits the highly medicated and life-rejecting Min in hospital.

Min beckons Hattie to her bedside and whispers "Please let me die." There is no melodrama in her tone; death is what she wants, has wanted for some time.

The kids ask what their mother said. Hattie spontaneously replies that she's been instructed to please find their long-missing father, a painter who, loving Min and their kids, but surfeiting on the psychoses, ran off some years earlier.

“ If you want usual, this is not your book ”

The heart of the book is an automotive road journey made by Hattie, Thebes and Logan to find Cherkis, the kids' dad, who is, Hattie believes, running an art gallery in a place called Murdo, South Dakota.

Anyone who has ever taken long "just point the car and go" trips (this reviewer, for one) will recognize many of the victories, defeats, setbacks, laughable lunacies, sudden wonders and sprints forward of their secular hegira.

Toews writes her road song in a high-energy original voice filled with love, fear, humour and originality.

This energetic originality does have literary sisters and brothers: Sherman Alexie, Billie Livingston, Emma Richler, Zoe Whittall, Thomas King and the inevitable J. D. Salinger come immediately to mind. The power-thrust, the growing pains, the humour, the surprises and the layering are core to all of the above.

Toews also knows that the young and younger, while still "kids," are frequently far older and wiser than those who are afraid of the young, and/or those who infantilize their children, are willing or able to admit.

When you take all this and lock it into the claustrophobia of a beater car, containing a lovelorn guilty sibling, an 11-year-old with multicoloured hair, a dictionary (from which she reads aloud) and an aversion to bathing, a teenaged boy with all the petulant masked tenderness of adolescent males (plus a gift for poetry and a compulsion to shoot hoops any time he can find a basket), it can, and sometimes does, overload. There were moments when I had to put the book down, just to absorb where the Troutmans had been, and where they might, with decent if wide-ranging luck, be headed.

Sometimes, when Toews gets on a roll, it rolls into a rant, and would not lose any power with some interstitial cutting.

That said, Miriam Toews is an extraordinarily gifted writer, one who writes with unsentimental compassion for her people and an honest understanding of their past, the tectonic shifts of their present and variables of their future. I never stopped caring about them - even when I needed a breath-catch.

A Manitoban, she writes visually vivid descriptions of life in winter Winnipeg:

"It was so cold our pipes froze that night. I had to wrap them up in blankets and then sit on the floor using a hair dryer to blow hot air on them. A barrel fuse blew. I remember peering over the fuse box saying, stove, fridge, dryer, stove, fridge, dryer over and over, trying to figure them out. It was a record cold night, minus fifty-something with a deadly wind chill. Our house was shaking, none of our doors would close, and empty pizza boxes were flying past our windows. It was the kind of night where if you froze to death they'd have to set up a tent around your body with giant industrial heaters in it, just to be able to peel you off the ground."

Toews also offers one of my favourite examples of American knowledge concerning Canadian provinces. An American couple studies the Troutmans' Manitoba licence plate, deciding that it is from Anaconda, which they agree is somewhere in California.

The Flying Troutmans is rich in dialogue, huge amounts of it sometimes zany (Thebes reading aloud everything the dictionary says about the word "Moab"), sometimes stunningly sad, always character-true dialogue - with no quotation marks. None. Not singles, not doubles, not any. And Toews is so solid about who her people are and how they sound that it is all perfectly clear. And cleaner, for the absence of multiple flyspecks everywhere.

As a frequent writer of dialogue, I don't know if I'd have the skill (or editorial permission), but I profoundly admire Toews's liberated and liberating accomplishment.

I also wish to take a moment to thank Miriam Toews, whom I've never met, for sharing my long-held belief that the Grand Canyon is a big, brown, boring hole in the ground. I hope this shared belief does not cause either of us any problems at the U.S. border.

As noted earlier, if you want usual, this is not your book. If you know, as many do, that non-regulation people are very much with us (not the cutesies that people call "quirky" because they, the cutesy-callers, don't get out enough; I mean the honestly non-regulation), this is very much your book. And mine.

Contributing reviewer Gale Zoë Garnett's most recent book is the novella Room Tone. Her next novel, Savage Adoration, currently sorting its quotation marks, will appear next spring.