Toews, Miriam. All my
Puny Sorrows. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf. 2014
At a recent seminar in Saskatoon on Faith and Literature, a participant raised a question regarding
Miriam Toews’ writing and the apparent raging against things Mennonite found
there—in his opinion. The family at the core of All my Puny Sorrow is ethnically Mennonite, their roots extending
back through a fictitious Southern Manitoba place called “East Village” to the
Russian-Mennonite immigration Of the 1870s. Mennonites are mentioned a dozen or
more times, but they are not identical to those in the questioner’s imagination:
“I don’t remember Mennonites of my youth being anything like Toews’
Mennonites,” he said.
And
neither do I, but then I’ve been around enough to know that the Mennonite basket contains many species
ranging from the stoical, authoritarian, legalistic sort to the variety that
barely differentiates from mainstream evangelical culture: Amish, Old Colony,
Holdemann, Bergthal, Krimmer, General Conference, Franconian, MB, EMC, . . . the
list is mighty long by now. What we know about the central characters in AMPS
is that they have lapsed from a conservative village-church mentality as a
gradual process over at least two generations so that the central character,
Yolandi—now in her 40s—connects to Mennonite roots only through her aging
mother, aunts, uncles and the memories of some Plaut Dietsch phrases, hymns and
childhood ditties. Plus some lingering memories—quite probably distorted—of her
childhood.
Memory of the restrictive culture
of Yolandi’s youth surfaces frequently (“the bishop—the alpha Mennonite—came to
our house for what he liked to call a visit . . . in reality it was more of a
raid. He showed up on a Saturday in a convoy with his usual posse of elders,
each in his own black, hard-topped car—they never carpool because it’s not as
effective in creating terror when thirteen or fourteen similarly dressed men
tumble out of one car . . . p. 11). And Yolandi—the first-person narrator—says
of her sister Elf: “ . . . he’s not a Mennonite, which is important—in a
man—for Elf. Mennonite men have wasted too much of her time already, trying to
harvest her soul and shackle her to shame (p. 27).
But this is not “Mennonite
Literature,” per se; and I would caution readers to get over these references
and pay attention to the real story here. The transition from authoritarian,
conservative ways of binding communities together to greater freedom of thought
and action by individuals is painful in any culture. in fact, I would say that
Toews has a tendency to exploit memories of religious restrictiveness and of
her own life story too much, and to the detriment of her art. AMPS would not
have suffered from omission of the “Mennonite” factor. In fact, I find it to be
gratuitous and a major distraction besides being acquiescent to a degree of
self-indulgence on the author’s part.
The
theme around which AMPS revolves is summarized in its title, a phrase borrowed from
a Coleridge poem,
but the “puny sorrows” for Yolandi’s family are not actually that “puny.”
Yolandi’s father is a fictionalized version of author Toews’ own father who
suffered from clinical depression and took his life on a train track (see Swing Low by Toews). Family-suicide
histories qualify—to my mind—as colossal, permanent sorrows that can debilitate
those left behind and haunt the living as far as “the third and fourth
generation” if Exodus
34: 6 & 7 are to be applied, and if suicide is considered an iniquity as one of Yolandi’s compatriots
staunchly proclaims.
Toews
has again tackled life’s more difficult themes. What is living worth if sorrow
and loss are its dominant characteristics? How might God—if there is one;
Yolandi isn’t sure—view the self-destroying impulses of those for whom life is
a wading through the psychological hell we call depression? What do the living
owe to those who face the great abyss?
Yolandi’s mother is the betwixt
and between Mennonite Muttachen with
one foot in the ordered traditions of Mennonite village life and the other in
the secular world in which her children and grandchildren now move. The novel
is both a physical and a psychological journey from East Village to Winnipeg to
Toronto, each stage representative of a life change for the main characters,
where Toronto obviously represents a post-modern kind of world with little in
common with southern Manitoba. As her generation and her ties disappear,
Yolandi’s mother eventually finds herself adapting to Toronto in Yolandi’s
haphazard household: “She’s a short, fat seventy-six-year-old Mennonite prairie
woman who has lived most of her life in one of the country’s most conservative
small towns, who has been tossed repeatedly through life’s wringer, and who has
rather suddenly moved to the trendy heart of the nation’s largest city to
begin, as they say, a new chapter in her life (p. 285).” The intent is unclear
and this sentence—complete with the mixed metaphor of being “tossed through
life’s wringer”— exemplifies some of the things that make this a flawed novel
on several levels.
Despite repeatedly telling us about the inner workings of
characters and the inclusion of copious dialogue, the most important characters
are, unfortunately, caricatures. Elfrieda (Elf) is a successful and talented
concert pianist with lots of accolades, approbation and money, apparently.
Through the first three-quarters of the novel, she is in hospital whining to
Yolandi about wanting to die, begging Yolandi to help her die, refusing to eat,
all without any substantial clue as to the motivation behind this drawn-out
desire to be dead. Her “unjustified” despair may accurately portray the reality
of a certain mental state which I don’t for one minute want to disparage, but
this is a novel, a work of art, and an accepted standard of this particular art
is that the characters be full-bodied. Why doesn’t she want to be cured? one
can justifiably ask.
Yolandi is, of course, the
central character and narrator and I can already hear speculations as to her
possible autobiographical source. I’ve nothing to add to that discussion either
way, but it’s actually irrelevant. I once had a discussion with Rudy Wiebe in a
fiction writing course in which I defended the actions of one of my characters
on the basis that “it actually happened.” “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It
can’t happen in the piece of art you’re trying to create without spoiling the
whole.” Verisimilitude was what Wiebe was trying to teach me about and I find
it missing in Yolandi who encourages confusion with her creator by saying
things like: “. . . I told him that it was ludicrous to think that we could
just talk our way out of shame, that shame was necessary, that it prevented us
from repeating shameful actions and that it motivated us to say we were sorry
and to seek forgiveness and to empathize with our fellow humans and to feel the
pain of self-loathing which motivated some of us to write books as a futile
attempt at atonement, and shame also helped, I told my friend, to fuck up
relationships and fucked-up relationships are the life force of books and
movies and theatre so sure, let’s get rid of shame but then we can kiss art
goodbye too (p. 201). The fact that Yolandi writes rodeo romances but would
like to write a real artistic novel plays against her sister’s artistic
accomplishments, but the way this irony is mishandled here leaves the reader wondering
if Yolandi is a really smart person who says and does things that are beneath
her, or just a flake who repeats stuff she’s heard that she hopes will identify
her as brilliant . . . in an avant-garde, Toronto-kind-of-way, of course.
Readers of AMPS that I’ve
encountered have high praise as do reviewers on Amazon. I agree that it’s an
engrossing read and that that was my experience as well. So there are a number
of features on which Toews has obviously hit the mark, although I would say
that part of the appeal comes from our tendency to run toward a plane crash to
satisfy our curiosity. AMPS is a plane crash, and as news of a literal crash
must subside and be relinquished—overtaken by the ordinary—so Toews’ plane
crash must have a critical climax followed by the cooling smoulder of ruins
scattered on the site; a “novel crash” must have a satisfying denouement. In
the case of AMPS, the period between the crash and “the end” is too long for my
taste—to the point of tediousness even.
Readers who follow Toews’ career
shouldn’t miss the interviews on You Tube, particularly the one done by CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi.