Toews is a master of voice, and Swiv's, with its mix of precocious parroting of Mooshie and Elvira and exasperation with them, is one that I could read forever. In return, Swiv receives lessons in how to fight, and how to survive.įight Night is narrated by Swiv, in the form of a letter to her missing father - a pair of risks that (mostly) pay off. Elvira - her heart petering out, dependent on nitroglycerin spray - relies on Swiv to help her bathe, accompany her around the city, and saw her whodunnits into slenderer (and thus easier to hold) volumes. Mooshie - preoccupied with her third trimester, the play she's rehearsing, her sister's suicide, and her husband's walking out - relies on Elvira to watch Swiv.
Fight Night once again explores multigenerational female relationships, but this time zeroes in on one Toronto family: nine-year-old Swiv, who has been expelled from school for fighting Mooshie, Swiv's mother, an actor who is heavily pregnant and Elvira, Mooshie's effervescent and sui generis mother and the stand-in for Toews's mother, whose name is also Elvira.
Toews's latest, Fight Night, brings the thread of her "one big book" back home and broadens what it means to stay and fight. They have three options: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave.Īuthor Interviews 'Women Talking' Gives A Human Voice To Horror The result is a Greek chorus of eight women who meet in a hay loft to discuss what they should do in response to the attacks. Women Talking is "an act of female imagination" responding to the men of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia who serially drugged and raped their women and girls for years. Her last novel, 2018's Women Talking, introduced a variation into this pattern, exploring the lives of people Toews does not know personally, but to whom she is distantly related. At the heart of Toews's "one big book" are the central traumas of her life - the depressions and suicides of both her father and sister - which she kaleidoscopically parses, considering what it means to trudge forward after catastrophic loss. She peppers her novels with Plautdietsch dialect, punctuates them with absurdity that deflates sanctimony, and centers them on the perspectives of strong women who have suffered much but are determined to persevere. Toews has, again and again, mined the oppressive patriarchy and repressive religion of the Mennonite community she left behind. Every protagonist is some version of me and there's always some version of my sister, some version of my mother, just some version of the people in my world."
In a recent interview with The Globe and Mail, Canadian writer Miriam Toews explained that she thinks of all of her novels as "one big book.
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