“It doesn’t matter what words you use in life, it’s not gonna prevent you from suffering.” This is one of many pills of wisdom cheerfully dispensed by grandmother Elvira to her nine-year-old granddaughter Swiv, the precocious and endearing child narrator of Miriam Toews’s new novel Fight Night. The title is a metaphor for the struggle of living, but also indicative of the plucky, joyous story to follow, where three generations of women from one tragedy-stricken family band together to protect and assist each other through the journey of life, the road that goes only in one direction.
Child narrators are notoriously tricky, either limiting the writer’s facility for language and style, or if not, resulting in a character that appears too knowing and eloquent to be credible. At best, though, the voice of the child creates inherent dramatic irony, innocence exploited, whereby the reader knows more than the person telling the story. We understand the nuances of the adult world, anticipate pitfalls and problems, taking on, often unconsciously, a protector role that gets us remarkably close to the character’s experiences and the corresponding emotional responses.
Fight Night is full of oppositions, a book that revels in dichotomies: life and death, joy and sorrow, tragedy and comedy
Notable examples that come to mind include Last Things by Jenny Offill, Bewilderment by Richard Powers and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon. Fight Night holds its own in the arena, with Swiv coming vibrantly to life, a mix of wiliness and naivety, anxiety and amusement, good and bad, a child who is expelled from school for fighting, yet takes it upon herself to nurse her grandmother through debilitating chronic pain. Fight Night is full of oppositions, a book that revels in dichotomies: life and death, joy and sorrow, tragedy and comedy, or as Elvira puts it in her inimitable way, “Well, jeepers creepers! Aren’t they all one and the same?”
Great verve
Swiv’s narrative – framed as a letter to her absent father, a conceit that doesn’t really go anywhere – is loaded with reported speech from her grandmother that gives great verve to the text: “Now we’re talking turkey … Our revenge will be the laughter of our children! [a Bobby Sands line, surely?] … You’re treading on thin ice, my friend … Scorched earth! … Fun and games! … What’s done is done.” These cliches and colloquialisms are made fresh through character, and particularly through Swiv’s interpretation of the sayings.
Elvira emerges as a humane, formidable woman, uncowed by bereavement, age, illness, even her approaching death
Toews captures the fears and embarrassments of childhood, such as when Swiv describes her first hug with a boy: “I liked the way his chest smelled. I felt like I was dying from something.” Feelings are weird, nudity is mortifying, sex and reproduction disgusting. The last of these is humorously built into the plot as Swiv’s mother struggles through her third trimester while trying to hold down an acting job in an industry depicted as brutal and predatory.
An inset narrative about Swiv’s mother’s time on location in Albania with a maniacal director appears halfway through the book, when Swiv and Grandma abscond for a poignant minibreak to California. A flight delay turns into an opportunity for Elvira to tell Swiv about her mother’s experiences in Albania. Swiv records the conversation on her phone, another framing device that feels contrived, with one too many interruptions reminding us about the flight delay that prompts the revelations. A further issue is with the use of ellipses for Elvira’s voice. While reflective of the spoken-word quality of the tale, it makes for distracting reading on the page.
Artful artlessness
Back in Swiv’s narrative, the reported action through limited vocabulary is occasionally wearying for the reader, but there is art in this seemingly artless style; the success is with tone of voice and characterisation.
Toews, from a small Mennonite community in Canada, is the author of seven bestselling novels, among them Summer of My Amazing Luck, Irma Voth and All My Puny Sorrows. She has won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize, among other accolades. As with some of her earlier writing, Fight Night is semiautobiographical, with the luminous Elvira based on the author’s mother.
This portrait is the other great success of the novel. Elvira emerges as a humane, formidable woman, uncowed by bereavement, age, illness, even her approaching death. She has the steeliness of her immigrant history, and the rare ability to step back from perceived slights to understand where other people might be coming from. Hugely courageous and relentlessly optimistic in the face of adversity, she is a superb role model for Swiv: “Are you kidding me? It’s only pain. We don’t worry about pain. It’s not life-threatening.”
In a typically incandescent detail, Elvira is the kind of woman who gets her granddaughter to saw up novels to be read in segments because, “She likes stories to be fast and troublesome and funny, and life too. She doesn’t like hauling epic things around.” The same can be said of Fight Night.
