Their voices course through her - she sometimes mimics their phrases in italics (“ entered menopause,” “ fine fettle,” “ nesting instinct”), and sometimes holds a tape recorder directly up to Elvira as she tells “The Truth About Mom.” Toews is a master of dialogue, and she swirls the adults’ perspectives through Swiv’s imperfect ventriloquism as if she were mixing paints.Įlvira is a larger-than-life figure: Unafraid of death - of anything, really - she wears velour track suits and sprays passing cop cars with her garden hose. Nine-year-old Swiv is a tangle-haired child who lives with her mother and grandmother, Elvira. “Fight Night” is the story of three generations of women as told by the youngest of them. “What makes a tragedy bearable and unbearable is the same thing,” she writes, “which is that life goes on.” “Fight Night,” her eighth novel, finds its characters in the aftermath of it all: The suicides are long in the past, the Mennonite village long left behind. Toews’s fire is a twin flame: the suicides of her father and sister, a decade apart, both by stepping onto train tracks and the authoritarian, patriarchal Mennonite values that she escaped. Her books are an excavation, an attempt to give shape to her own pain, like a moth who longs to catch the candlelight in its wings. She is the kind of writer for whom the act of writing is clearly more important than being read. Most of her novels contain some version of her sister, some version of her mother, some version of herself, some version of the restrictive Canadian Mennonite community in which she was raised. Miriam Toews gets so close to the fire that the pages of her books may as well be singed. I’ve heard it theorized that every great artist circles her own central fire, a core trauma too bright and too hot to touch yet whose light is caught, refracted, in her works.

Miriam tor books