A Complicated Kindness

Miriam Toews

4 ideas

1. The Nickel family dissolves under shunning

   In East Village, Manitoba, a Mennonite town run by church elder Hans Rosenfeldt, 'The Mouth', who is also her uncle, sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel lives alone with her father Ray after her sister Tash leaves with her boyfriend and her mother Trudie disappears after being excommunicated. Ray, a devout and gentle teacher, slowly sells off the furniture and finally leaves town too, leaving Nomi the house and car. She is left to decide whether to stay in a town with no future for her beyond the local chicken-processing plant.

2. Shunning turns love into enforcement

   Shunning works by making believers withdraw affection from anyone who breaks the rules, so the loyalties that normally hold a family together become the means of punishment. Because members believe the exclusion is meant to save the sinner, they can take part in cruelty while seeing themselves as kind. This makes the practice very hard to resist from inside.

3. Closed communities harden by losing their dissenters

   When a strict community offers leaving as the only real alternative to obeying, the people most likely to question it are the ones who go. Each departure removes a source of internal pushback, so the people who remain become more uniform and the rules grow more rigid. The community's survival depends on continually driving off the members who might have changed it.

4. Deadpan humor as a survival tool

   A narrator facing grief she cannot change uses flat, ironic jokes to keep enough distance from it to keep functioning. The humor lets her describe loss without being overwhelmed, while the gaps in what she says reveal how much she is hurting. Seen this way, a teenager's sarcasm reads as evidence of how serious the situation is, not as indifference to it.

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