When I first started reading this book I thought it was funny. It seemed like a typical teenage angst story like Juno, Superbad, or Catcher in the Rye, but this book turned out quite differently, because the conflict didn't resolve itself in a neat little Hollywood ending the way it normally does. It sort of just leaves us with this sense of emptyness; the main character sitting on the floor wondering what is going to happen to her and remembering when her family was still there.
I'm particularly disturbed by the note that Ray leaves for Nomi. Why list her name with only the first initial? This makes it harder to find her, should anyone come looking. And what work do they have to do? It seems so bizarre, and in a strange way totally Mennonite, that Nomi is not angry at her family for leaving her. She does not blame them for leaving, in fact she sees their leaving as an act of selflessness. She says Trudie left to keep Ray from losing his faith. She says Ray left to keep from losing his love of her. I'm not sure what really happened but this explanation doesn't make any sense. If they loved each other why didn't they just move somewhere new, together?
It seems ironic because Ray is such a good man by Mennonite standards. He is so obsessed with order that he organizes trash at the local dump. He takes the time and care to organize everything the world has defined as worthless. This seems to me like some strange interpretation of the first shall be last and the last shall be first. Ray seems to search for worth were ever it is not found.
A couple choice lines from the last chapter;
"How did he leave? Walk? Hitchhike? How do you leave a town with not train, no bus, no car?"
"The Mouth had suggested once that my mother might have killed herself out of guilt and regret. I think it was the ending he most enjoyed. The typically grim outcome that made sense to him.
Let's be realistic, he said, which had made even my dad laugh out loud. But it did make me wonder. If she had planned to travel far away from this pace why had she left her passport behind in the top drawer of her and my dad's dresser? Was her body at the bottom of the Rat River, her hazel eyes wide open, staring in eternal mock horror at the flailing limbs of fifteen-year-olds being forced underwater in baptism by her brother, The Mouth? Or was she alive and well and selling Amway or something in some tourist town on the Eastern Seabord? Or maybe she had finally managed to get to Israel and was working as a courier in Tel Avia?
Had my dad really gone to pick garbage off mountains or was he also at the bottom of the Rat - no, I preferred the first story, the one about sacrifice and pain, because it presented opportunities of being happy again."
This is the question the author leaves us with. Are Nomi's parents dead and if so is she better off living with her lies? In this way her life asks a question about her Mennonite community? Is it better that the community keeps living with its lies?
Hmmmm. I wonder how many of us tell ourselves "lies" to get through life? At the end of the novel Nomi says several times that she "prefers" a certain version of a story over another because it lets her live with hope. What is the function of stories? Is it to anesthetize us to the pain of reality, or is it to help us rise above the mishaps of everyday life and connect to something larger than ourselves? Doe stories offer us false hope, or are they Ariadne's thread that helps us find our way through the labyrinth of life? It appears that the characters in this book are carrying fragments of a story (the Mennonite one, perhaps, but also the story of the perfectly functional nuclear family) that has lost its usefulness to them. I wonder, when Tash, and Trudi, and Ray leave, have they also let go of the story? Or have they chosen another one? At the end of the book it appears that Nomi is reluctant to leave a place that has given her a story larger than the one she can make up on her own.
ReplyDeleteThese are really good questions to ask. I think the way Toews ends the book allows the readers to answer these questions for themselves, or for there to be more than one answer. I personally think that Nomi will, at some point, need to confront the lies the community has believed. If Ray and Trudie are alive, then she cannot go her entire life without seeing them again.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, I think the way the book ends forces to the reader to in some way confront the lies their own communities believe in, especially in the case of religious and/or Mennonite communities. In my own experience, after finishing the book, I was reminded of the lies my home church told themselves about racism and sexism (among other oppressions), especially in terms of the white male savior complex and evangelism.