Miriam Toews saunters along the line between comedy and grief as if she might lose her balance at any moment. But she never does. The precarious tone of her novels about fractured families is the crafted effect of a nimble writer. Raised by Mennonites in a small Canadian town, Toews has developed an irresistible sense of absurdity leavened with real affection for the quirky characters who inhabit her stories.The Flying Troutmans, her fourth novel, invites immediate comparison with the popular indie movie "Little Miss Sunshine." Like Michael Arndt's film, it's about a collection of oddball family members on a cross-country road trip toward a highly unlikely goal. Deadpan irony and hip cultural references abound. But Toews steps over the camp and sentimentality of "Little Miss Sunshine" and displays a sharper sense of the grinding tragedy of mental illness.The story is narrated by Hattie Troutman, a young woman who's just been dumped by her flaky boyfriend in Paris when she gets word that her older sister, Min, has fallen into a deep depression -- again. Hattie would rather wander around the City of Light feeling sorry for herself, but somebody has to take care of Min and her two kids back in Canada. She's been trying to kill herself for years, Hattie explains. "I had no choice. There was no question." But she finds the situation at home even more alarming than she'd feared. Bedridden and suicidal, Min needs to be hospitalized immediately. "Please help me die," she asks Hattie, and then tells her not to let the kids visit. "It's too hard."Unable to let her niece and nephew know the truth and realizing that they'll be sent into foster care, Hattie devises a half-baked scheme to find their father. With only a vague sense of where he might be -- somewhere in California, perhaps -- the three of them set out in a rickety old van.Yes, the road trip storyline is a little tread-worn, but Toews has created such an engaging cast for this 2,000-mile trek that you'll never be tempted to ask, "Are we there yet?" Most of the novel's success stems from the fact that Min's two witty children are irresistible characters, alternately vulnerable, affectionate, terrified, brave and annoying. They're also very bright, not like the "gifted" children of every parent in the Washington area, but scarily precocious, burdened with that alienating sense of insight that can wreak havoc on young lives.Hattie's 11-year-old niece, Thebes, who never bathes or changes her clothes, has fake tattoos all over her arms and dyes her hair intense purple. She wears a toy holster, practices martial arts, makes "oversized novelty cheques" for everyone, and greets strangers with gangsta salutations: "What's shakin' homies?" All sticky from cotton candy and covered in glitter, she's a tear-your-heart-out character."I'm on thin ice in the social hierarchy department," she tells her aunt, with her usual degree of disarming self-knowledge. Hattie notices that "Thebes had become a talking machine. Maybe she was attempting to use up all the words that Min had left behind, taking whatever popped into her head, any thought, idea or fact, and transforming it into sound, noise, life. She was talking for two, in double time."Her brother, 15-year-old Logan, seems a little better adjusted, but he's moody, teenage-quiet and in love with Deborah Solomon, the weekly Q&A columnist for the New York Times Magazine. Mostly, he's cloaked in a grey hoodie, listening to music on a pair of "giant air traffic controller headphones." But there are cracks in that impenetrable façade, times when Hattie can feel him screaming, "Rescue me."Toews is a genius at recording the everyday weirdness of young people, their capricious vacillation between screw-you sarcasm and tender pleading for affirmation. Some of the funniest parts of The Flying Troutmans describe the word games, art projects, true confessions and circular arguments to which a long, mind-numbing car trip can drive people of all ages. "Conversing with children is a fine art," Hattie realizes. "An art form that demands large amounts of both honesty and misdirection.""Can we not talk?" Logan pleads."Let's have a quiet contest," Hattie suggests.As this "ad hoc family" wanders through one comic encounter after another on their way to California, Toews keeps the story grounded with flashbacks of Hattie's childhood. Min suffered from a frightening range of symptoms of manic depression and suicidal, even homicidal, behavior that their parents struggled to ignore or laugh off. We're never allowed to forget for long that, beneath the comedy, this is a story of loving someone who is mentally ill and of standing by your responsibilities no matter what.Hattie believes she has no idea what she's doing, but her instincts are right. "There is not one single thing that I am certain of," she confesses, "except that I have to make sure Thebes and Logan are taken care of." There is no false promise in this story, just an awareness that in this chaotic world the only stability comes from our love for one another, quirks and all. In Toews's hands, that can be funny or heartbreaking, usually at the same time. When Hattie describes Logan as "all badly disguised tenderness and tentative joy," you know just what she means.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/...
i have this gr friend i won’t say their name and they read this book and told me jo you should read it it’s sort of like Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones which if you don’t remember is the 2011 national book award winner and describes a poor rural black family before and during hurricane katrinaas you can imagine i was intrigued on account of what can this little canadian romp of a book possibly have in common with salvage the bones which is dead serious and sultry and racked with tragedy and so sticky hot you want to take a shower after reading each chunk what can these two books possibly have in commonand the answer the short answer is nothingthe long answer can get pretty long on account of ink, paper, library of congress headings, title page, page numbers, you get the ideabut this here book this here slim book is a thing of beauty even though it’s not a thing of beauty in the way in which salvage the bones is a thing of beauty which it is and the reason is that it’s one of those book they are a genre really that give you the pain of kids with tons of humor and quirkiness but it’s still a lot of pain and it could be really sad but what makes it less sad and maybe not even sad at all is that it allows you to contain it you feel you are making a difference you are there reading the book and the kids are not alone because you are there and you are getting it and as long as you are there loving the kids they will be okaynow the first and forever best in this genre is The Catcher in the Rye and another masterpiece in this genre is Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You and i must say that unlike in these two previous books in this here flying troutmans book there actually is an adult who cares and is there just like you are seeing and hearing and getting the kids’ pain the problem being however that this adult is also a bit fucked up so you are needed too which feels good because you are there and you care consequently everyone will be okaynow the thing about this book is that like those other two i mentioned it’s very funny but unlike the other two i mentioned is really really fast well let me qualify it has parts that are really fast and those are the parts that have to do with little 11-year-old thebes a character that easily rivals holden caulfield as the best kid character ever to appear in the history of quirky kid character literature but then there are parts in which the focus is on the other kid her brother logan and those parts slow the book way down like you had your car in fifth gear and you forced it into third gearthere’s a loud RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR and the car slows way downand i could totally talk about what the story is about and how the pain of the kids is described and all that and i also could talk about how unrealistic this story is how it doesn’t make sense at all but this would be boring and what i really want to say is that Miriam Toews' prose is nothing short of virtuosic and this little deceptively simple book could not have been written by anyone other than a genius writer and i also want to say if you decide to read it give it a minute get in the groove and then let yourself be delighted by how amazing the writing is and how big the heart producing it is and thank you miriam toews for having given me a good sane ride along with people who love each other because to tell you the truth i kind of needed it
What do You think about The Flying Troutmans (2008)?
I know that Miriam Toews is a much beloved writer in Canada and one should be kind with one's comments, but I found this road story a bit claustrophobic at times despite the waves of humour that the writer conjures for us. Three people in an ailing van - 28 year-old Aunt Hattie and her 15-year old nephew Logan, the basketball junkie driving without a licence, and his unwashed super-intelligent 11 year-old sister Thebes - all running away from an impossibly suicidal Mum in Manitoba, and searching for Dad in California. All this travel can get a bit boring at times, despite the snappy dialogue, humorous situations, the vitality of youth exuded, and the interesting bookended parental figures. There were only so many novel things the travellers could do on the trip before I got the sense that the author was contriving dialogue and situations to keep this story moving, just like that ailing van.Now that I have been unkind, let me speak to the part that enlightened me: psychotics should never procreate and raise families, despite how loving they are to their children; it’s absolutely selfish on their part, because it's those around them who have to pick up the pieces and deal with the guilt. And Toews, in this dramatic-comedy, gets this point across very elegantly. Min is the psychotic mother, hell-bent on self-destruction, while Hattie is her younger sister, plagued with responsibility and guilt because of it. No one is spared: Min's father drowns trying to save her, Hattie breaks up with her boyfriend to come to Min's bedside and takes responsibility for Min's children while Min tries to "discover" herself yet again, Cherkis, the children's father, is chased from the family home in one of Min's rages, and the children, Logan and Thebes, are constantly on the alert for Mum's next meltdown, and trying to avoid the realization that they are alone in the world.My next revelation was that these characters, the Troutman family, symbolize the 21st century middle class in Canada, and are so emotionally conflicted and impoverished that they almost come across as freaks: not socially responsible or socialized, leading lives that go from one self-absorbed moment to the next. Thebes does not wash herself but finds pleasure in asking questions prompted by a dictionary, or in making giant gift cheques; Logan is constantly buried under his hoodie with his headphones on, or in a pulp magazine purchased at the last gas station, or is found carving cryptic messages on the dashboard, or shooting hoops on any basketball court that comes his way. The Troutman represent the new poverty class in this country, the poverty of the soul. Is this the legacy of Min and her self-destructive nature?In the end, some break out of this cycle of guilt and others are drawn back into the vortex the moment Min is released from hospital and her whereabouts are unknown. I liked this ending - it's true to life. It says to me that one is never free of these psychotic siblings or parents - they are a curse that you are gifted with until death do you part.I also realized that I prefer the use of quotations marks to indicate dialogue. This book had dispensed with quotation marks and I found that Toews’ conversational narrative style confuses dialogue with narrative at times and forces her to use a lot of unnecessary attributions.Certainly a quick read, but not one of my better ones.
—Shane
This is my favorite book. For all this time, whenever I’ve been asked that question, I’ve said, “Oh, there are so many that I love, it’s impossible to pin down just one and call it my favorite.”Now, it’s possible.The characters, the storyline, the writing, the dialog all comes together so that every word is necessary and there aren’t any to spare. It is just perfect.Hattie is on a road trip with her 15 year-old nephew, Logan and 11 year-old niece, Thebes. The kids’ mother, Min, is mentally ill and admitted into a psychiatric hospital again. Hattie is called back to help out. She feels inadequate with these kids and with her quest and with herself every step of the way. It was a lot like a Hornby book in that I could relate to none of the characters in particular, but could take pieces from each of them and see some part of me reflected. From the 15 year-old boy, to Hattie, to her sister, to the judgmental strangers who stared at them when they stopped. Because while I fell in love with these little freaks, I did have to pause and wonder how I would really react to these people if I met them at a restaurant or gas station. It’s funny and deep and insightful. If you liked Little Miss Sunshine at all (and really, who didn’t), then you’d like this.Here are some of my favorite tidbits:“Admittedly, I would have preferred to keep roaming around Paris pretending to be an artist with my moody, adjective-hating boyfriend, Marc, but he was heading off to an ashram in India anyway and said we could communicate telepathically. I tried it a couple of days before he left. I love you, don’t go, I said silently, without moving my lips. He was standing next to me, trying to photograph a gargoyle. You’re a little in my way, he said. Can you move? No amount of telepathy worked with him, but maybe you have to be thousands of miles away from someone in order for your thoughts to work up the speed and velocity required to hit their target.”--“Logan Troutman, [Thebes] said. You’ve experienced a lot of failure in the past. What makes you think this venture will be a success?Logan: I have a very positive mental attitude. Plus, it helps that I really don’t care.”--“Word, said Colt. I’m down. I wish I lived on Moralia. Thebes had found a soulmate in this homicidal cosmonaut. Impeccably, somberly united in their mutual, impossible longing to live in places that weren’t real, they high-fived and punched and slapped and then gazed for a while out the window at the real world, the one they’d had it with.”--“Hey, isn’t the Grand Canyon around here somewhere? She said. Hey, another chunk of the world missing from our lives. Another giant hole in the surface of our universe. Let’s find it!”The whole book is full of treasures just like that. All lined up one after another. The copy I just finished is on loan from the library. I’m going to hold onto it until I can buy my own. I want to have it around here, if only so I can every once in a while read this:“Min was in the universe. She was a dim and falling star, but she was alive. She hadn’t loved watching the sun’s eclipse as much as she’d loved watching it reappear. If she had really, truly wanted to die, she’d have succeeded a long time ago. She loved the brink, going to it and returning from it. Or maybe she didn’t love it. Maybe she hated it. But, it didn’t really matter. Maybe going to the brink made her feel like she’d accomplished something extraordinary, like there was a purpose to her life, if only to prolong it in spite of herself. She was the captain of both teams, waging war against herself but always pulling back from any decisive victory because that would also mean a decisive loss.”
—Rita
This is the first Miriam Toews book I've read, and if they're all like this, then I will be reading all of her books!It is so great when a book is so well written, it just sucks you in and pulls you through. I'd started two other books before this one and didn't get past five pages in them, they were so uninspiring in their writing. Then this one, and after one full page I was hooked. I love the dialogue, I love Thebes, the crazy eleven year old, and Logan, the 15 yr old full of teen angst and real-life problems. Hattie is messed up but real, too. It's just a good story about family love and survival in the midst of a bad hand of cards. And really, anyone who can write a story about three people in a van on a road trip and keep it interesting and realistic is genius. Kind of a literary Little Miss Sunshine, but better.
—Lorraine
