Not only does Elvira share Toews’s own mother’s name the author allows her characters to slip and slide along her own history. “ Fight Night,” her eighth novel, embeds us with the family of 9-year-old Swiv, de facto caretaker for her 86-year-old grandmother, Elvira, and chief factotum for her hugely pregnant single mother, Mooshie. It’s material worthy of a life’s work, and not one of Toews’s books (including a memoir about her father’s death by suicide, “Swing Low”) is like another, neither in tone nor in structure nor in plot. Thank goodness.īecause those novels, such as “ Women Talking” and “ All My Puny Sorrows” and “Irma Voth,” all include her Canadian Mennonite background, her family’s struggles with mental illness, and her humor in the face of life’s slings and arrows. Miriam Toews mines the same material over and over again in her novels.
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