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.
