Review of FIGHT NIGHT by Miriam Toews (New Release)

 4 Stars

The narrator is 9-year-old Swiv who lives in Toronto with her mother, who is in the last trimester of her pregnancy, and her Grandma Elvira.  Having been expelled from school, Swiv stays home and her grandmother becomes her teacher.  She gives Swiv a writing assignment:  to write to her absent father.  The book is her letter to her dad describing daily events and a trip she and Grandma take together.  The other character of note is Gord; though they do not know the unborn child’s gender, they have named it Gord.

There is not much of a plot; instead, the focus is on the relationship between Swiv and Grandma.  Though she has several health issues, Grandma lives with exuberance.  She has not had an easy life and has experienced tragedies so she knows life can be painful, but she believes one should live joyfully and fight ferociously to live on his/her own terms.  This is the lesson she wants Swiv to learn, and she teaches it to her through both action and word.

Grandma left an ultraconservative community under the control of a man named Willit Braun.  Though the Mennonite religion and the author’s hometown of Steinbach are never mentioned, the author’s background does suggest she is referencing both.  (She does mention the Disraeli Bridge in Winnipeg, and Grandma uses expressions like “Na Oba” which Swiv calls her grandmother’s “secret 57 language” but probably refers to Plautdietsch.) 

Grandma is highly critical of the church in which she grew up.  She describes how the church leaders, “all those men,” stole from followers "the imperative, the human imperative . . . to experience joy.  To find joy and to create joy.  All through the night.  The fight night. . . . They stole our souls . . . they replaced our love, our joy, our emotions . . . They took all those things and replaced them with evil and with guilt. . . . replaced our tolerance with condemnation, our desire with shame, our feelings with sin, our wild joy with discipline, our agency with obedience, our imaginations with rules, every act of joyous rebellion with crushing hatred, our impulses with self-loathing, our empathy with sanctimoniousness, threats, cruelty, our curiosity with isolation, willful ignorance, infantilism, punishment!”

She tells Swiv that, “They took our life force.  And so we fight to reclaim it . . . we fight and we fight and we fight . . . we fight to love . . . we fight to love ourselves . . . we fight for access to our feelings . . . for access to our fires.”  She tells her, “You have a fire inside you and your job is to not let it go out.”  To her unborn grandchild, she writes, “You’re a small thing and you must learn to fight.”  Grandma acknowledges that sometimes people lose but what is worse is to lose “by not trying and not fighting.  You play hard to the end, Swiv.  To the buzzer.  There is no alternative.”  Of course, “Fighting means different things for different people.  You’ll know for yourself what to fight.  Grandma told me fighting can be making peace.  She said sometimes we move forward by looking back and sometimes the onward can be knowing when to stop. . . . We all have fires inside us . . . Grandma said you pour so much alcohol on the fire inside you that it’s guaranteed never to go out.”

Grandma is an unforgettable character.  She is so joyful, believing that “You can only die once so don’t die a thousand times worrying about it.”  She tells a nephew that “Life is a failed mission! . . .  We’re all gonna go crazy and die so just have some fun.”  She laughs and sings and dances through her days.  She “loves to talk about the body.  She loves everything about the body, every nook and cranny. . . That’s life! she said.  You gotta love yourself.”   She uses colourful language, explaining, “It doesn’t matter what words you use in life, it’s not gonna prevent you from suffering.”   She suffers from gout, trigeminal neuralgia, angina, and arthritis but says, “It’s only pain.  We don’t worry about pain.  It’s not life-threatening.  It is not those who can inflict the most but those who can suffer the most who will conquer.”

Swiv is another memorable character.  She is certainly precocious, though there is much she does not understand.  Typical of someone her age, she is easily embarrassed by discussions of sex and bodily functions, topics both Grandma and Swiv’s mother often broach.  Grandma talks to everyone she meets and has no concern about what people think of her antics, so Swiv spends a lot of time feeling embarrassed and pretending she is not accompanying this crazy old lady.  Standing by chance next to a photo of a naked woman outside a strip club, Grandma “posed on the sidewalk in the same position as the naked lady in the picture with her knees bent a bit and her butt poking out and her hands on her boobs.  I looked down at the sidewalk for things to kill myself with.”   I felt some sympathy for Swiv but at the same time I envied her for having such a vivacious woman in her life.  At the end of the novel, it is wonderful to see Swiv using some of the lessons her grandmother has been teaching her.

What is remarkable about Swiv, her grandmother, and her mother is that they are so supportive of each other.  They are a team, and Grandma emphasizes that “We need teams.  We need others to fight alongside us. . . . Lonely fights are the worst, she said.  She’d rather lose a lonely fight.  She’d rather join a losing team than win a lonely fight.”

There is much wit and humour.  Much of the comedy comes from Grandma’s high jinks.  When teaching Swiv math, she gives her problems like “If it takes five years to kill a guy with prayer, and it takes six people a day to pray, then how many prayers of pissed off women praying every day for five years does it take to pray a guy to death?” and “If I’m 5’1” now . . . you’re 5’4”, and if you’re growing at the rate of two and a half inches per year and I’m shrinking at the rate of one quarter of an inch per year, when do we meet on the chart?” and “If you’ve got a two thousand-piece puzzle of an Amish farm and you manage to add three pieces to the puzzle per day, how many  more days will you need to stay alive to get it done?”

The book is described as a “tribute to perseverance” and indeed it is, reminding us that “what makes a tragedy bearable and unbearable is the same thing – which is that life goes on.”  Since the world cannot “be counted upon [because] it pleased itself.  Not much point in having special wishes” it is best to adopt the attitude that “So long as one could be alive, take part in it.” 

This novel has all of the hallmarks of a Miriam Toews novel:  memorable characters, humour, thought-provoking ideas, and a writing style where every word is significant.  Like all her books, it is a must-read.

Note:  I received a digital galley from the publisher via NetGalley.