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Book Reviews

Miriam toews' latest novel offers ardent, funny lessons in staying and fighting.

Kristen Martin

In a recent interview with The Globe and Mail , Canadian writer Miriam Toews explained that she thinks of all of her novels as "one big book. Every protagonist is some version of me and there's always some version of my sister, some version of my mother, just some version of the people in my world."

Toews has, again and again, mined the oppressive patriarchy and repressive religion of the Mennonite community she left behind. She peppers her novels with Plautdietsch dialect, punctuates them with absurdity that deflates sanctimony, and centers them on the perspectives of strong women who have suffered much but are determined to persevere. At the heart of Toews's "one big book" are the central traumas of her life — the depressions and suicides of both her father and sister — which she kaleidoscopically parses, considering what it means to trudge forward after catastrophic loss.

Her last novel, 2018's Women Talking , introduced a variation into this pattern, exploring the lives of people Toews does not know personally, but to whom she is distantly related . Women Talking is "an act of female imagination" responding to the men of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia who serially drugged and raped their women and girls for years. The result is a Greek chorus of eight women who meet in a hay loft to discuss what they should do in response to the attacks. They have three options: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave.

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Toews's latest, Fight Night , brings the thread of her "one big book" back home and broadens what it means to stay and fight. Fight Night once again explores multigenerational female relationships, but this time zeroes in on one Toronto family: nine-year-old Swiv, who has been expelled from school for fighting; Mooshie, Swiv's mother, an actor who is heavily pregnant; and Elvira, Mooshie's effervescent and sui generis mother and the stand-in for Toews's mother, whose name is also Elvira. Mooshie — preoccupied with her third trimester, the play she's rehearsing, her sister's suicide, and her husband's walking out — relies on Elvira to watch Swiv. Elvira — her heart petering out, dependent on nitroglycerin spray — relies on Swiv to help her bathe, accompany her around the city, and saw her whodunnits into slenderer (and thus easier to hold) volumes. In return, Swiv receives lessons in how to fight, and how to survive.

Fight Night is narrated by Swiv, in the form of a letter to her missing father — a pair of risks that (mostly) pay off. Toews is a master of voice, and Swiv's, with its mix of precocious parroting of Mooshie and Elvira and exasperation with them, is one that I could read forever. In the opening pages, we get such gems as, "Mom is having a complete nervous breakdown and a geriatric pregnancy which doesn't mean she's going to push an old geezer out of her vag, it means she's too old to be up the stump and is so exhausted ." And while the first half of the book is light on plot — like Women Talking , this is a novel driven mostly by women talking — it is carried by Swiv's transcriptions of Elvira's routine antics. In Toews's hands, mundanity teems with comic detail:

When she drops pills on the floor accidentally, if she notices she drops them, she says Bombs away, Swiv! ... I come running and drop down onto the floor and scramble around by her feet picking them up and also picking up hearing aid batteries and conchigliettes and pieces from her Amish farm puzzle.

Fight Night 's Elvira shares much with Elvira Toews: they both love the Raptors, suffer chronic heart conditions, and have left what Swiv calls the "town of escaped Russians." They've both lost a husband and daughter to suicide, and in the aftermath have grappled with how to keep living. For both Elviras, the answer to surviving grief is to ask "Who can I help?" The Elvira of Fight Night has moved in with Mooshie to help her through her "fear and anxiety and rage" borne of her sudden single motherhood, pregnancy, grief, and terror of inherited mental illness.

Helping Mooshie means helping Swiv, who's been reacting to mother's "scorched earth" moods and her father's absence by fighting to point that she comes home from school "with dried blood on [her] face." What Swiv is really worried about is death and bereavement — that her mother will go the way of her aunt and grandfather, that her grandma's heart will give out, that her father will never return. It is in these conversations that Toews distills the meaning of staying and fighting. The fight is for survival in a hostile world: The women in Fight Night have fought off their demons; the "pompous, authoritarian, insecure" leader of their Mennonite village and his similarly endowed male followers, "doucherocket" directors, an alcoholic husband looking for an excuse to leave, and a bloodline filled with depression telling the lie that leaving is the best option. For these women, fighting is pushing against the currents of despair and remembering, as Elvira puts it, that "we're here! We are all here now."

Swiv begins to comprehend this meaning of fighting in the second half of the novel, when she accompanies Elvira on a trip to visit her nephews in Fresno before the baby comes and while her heart will allow it. Amid the slapstick routines of negotiating airport travel, ill-advised dance moves at a nursing home, and a lurching lesson in driving a stick shift, Swiv finally learns what Mooshie — who is largely an absence in the book — has truly been fighting through in the past year. As Toews shifts the narration to Elvira, who for once stops laughing to be frank with Swiv, Fight Night delves into the abyss of despair, betrayal, stolen agency and stolen joy.

The journey to this dark place is brief, and part of me wished for more dwelling in the hardest parts of these women's lives — a kind of reflection that a nine-year-old, even one who has seen as much as Swiv, cannot provide. But, as Elvira says, "To be alive means full body contact with the absurd. Still, we can be happy." This is an apt mission statement for Toews's body of work. Fight Night makes an ardent, hilarious, and moving addition.

Kristen Martin's writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Believer, The Baffler, and elsewhere. She tweets at @kwistent .

Review: Miriam Toews’ ‘Fight Night’ is the ‘Ted Lasso’ of novels, for better and worse

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Fight Night

By Miriam Toews Bloomsbury: 272 pages, $24 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

There’s a reason “ Ted Lasso ” swept the Emmys this year. After an exceptionally exhausting two years that felt more like two decades, people need to laugh and be reminded of what’s worth fighting for, even if the feeling comes candy-coated and delivered by a character who leans on one-liners like a soccer player with a shin splint. But underneath Ted’s chipper demeanor, there’s trauma he’s working through, real meat in the script — including his father’s suicide.

I was reminded of this while reading “ Fight Night ,” the latest novel by Miriam Toews , which can veer from endearing to obvious to moving in a single chapter. On the whole, it’s a touching tribute to the matrilineal bond among three women of different generations, emphasizing the ways in which joy (as Elvira tells her granddaughter Swiv, our 9-year-old narrator) can be a form of resistance.

There are a number of colorful grandmothers in children’s books but a dearth of them in literary fiction. It’s a shame more writers don’t employ vibrant matriarchs in key roles. Perhaps the best in this category is Tove Jansson . Her 1972 novel, “ The Summer Book ,” centered on a 6-year-old and her grandmother on a Finnish island teeming with life, but tinged with death, shortly after the girl’s mother dies. It’s a slim tale of “lit moments, gleaming dark moments, like lights on a string,” as Ali Smith has written.

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Darkness lurks in “Fight Night” too. But where Jansson’s story was leavened by vivid writing on the natural world, Toews’ is buoyed by a grandmother’s defiant sense of humor. Elvira likes to say “bombs away” as she drops her pills on the floor, laughs at inappropriate moments, wears a nail polish called Lady Balls and makes conversation with ICU nurses and passing teenagers alike. “At some point in Grandma’s life someone must have threatened to kill her whole family unless she became friends with every single person she met,” Swiv thinks. Except for cops, whom she sprays with a garden hose when they step onto her lawn.

Toews’ 2014 novel “ All My Puny Sorrows ” (recently adapted into a film) addresses mental illness and suicide, a topic the author is well acquainted with. Her father and sister both took their own lives. In “Fight Night,” Toews returns to the subject within the context of a family living in Toronto: rambunctious Elvira; her daughter, heavily pregnant (with a child she refers to as Gord); and Swiv, stuck at home after being suspended from school. Swiv’s grandfather and aunt died by suicide. The father isn’t in the picture, though the book is written as a letter from Swiv to him, and Mom is an actress struggling with single parenthood and her own mental health.

The star of the show, however, is Elvira. The epigraph, a quote from John Steinbeck, establishes her MO: “An odd thing is that sadness does not necessarily become greater with age.” It’s not that she hasn’t experienced absolute despair — not only the loss of her husband and daughter and others over time but also the aftereffects of her childhood in an oppressive religious community. (Toews comes from a Mennonite background and often addresses patriarchal injustices in her work.)

But Elvira is determined to have a good time. “To be alive means full body contact with the absurd,” she tells Swiv during a particularly tough moment. “Still, we can be happy. Even poor Sisyphus could figure that much out. And that’s saying something.”

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Indeed, Elvira’s effervescence is gleefully absurd. She shows Swiv a walnut-size lump on her body and tells her she’s growing a new arm to hug her with. In the second half of the book, the two go on an adventure to Fresno. At a senior citizens home, Elvira entertains some old friends with a dance they remember fondly from their youth, but she kicks too high, breaks her arm and knocks out a tooth. She asks Swiv to drive them home, giving her an impromptu lesson in using a stick shift. “We jerked along, singing and yelling. Grandma told me I was doing a great job! We’re getting there! But she didn’t even really know how to get there or where we were going. She didn’t care. She just thought it was hilarious that somehow we were moving forward at all.”

It is a feat, when you think about it — the resilience we can find, even if it manifests itself as the dangerous careening of a car driven by a child. Swiv’s mother, meanwhile, worries she has inherited the depression to which her father and sister succumbed. “She said if she wasn’t fighting she was dying,” Swiv relays to us. “And that she has to fight to feel alive and to balance things out. So she keeps fighting. She said we’re all fighters, our whole family. Even the dead ones. They fought the hardest.”

Toews’ greatest talent lies in creating messy and lovable characters — the kind of people you’d want on your team (or coaching your team) if you were in a fight. Not because they are the strongest, but because somewhere inside themselves they’ve found the energy to keep moving forward.

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From Miriam Toews, a Tragicomedy About the Dysfunctional World of Adults

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By Nadja Spiegelman

• Oct. 3, 2021

FIGHT NIGHT By Miriam Toews

I’ve heard it theorized that every great artist circles her own central fire, a core trauma too bright and too hot to touch yet whose light is caught, refracted, in her works. Miriam Toews gets so close to the fire that the pages of her books may as well be singed. Most of her novels contain some version of her sister, some version of her mother, some version of herself, some version of the restrictive Canadian Mennonite community in which she was raised. She is the kind of writer for whom the act of writing is clearly more important than being read. Her books are an excavation, an attempt to give shape to her own pain, like a moth who longs to catch the candlelight in its wings.

Toews’s fire is a twin flame: the suicides of her father and sister, a decade apart, both by stepping onto train tracks; and the authoritarian, patriarchal Mennonite values that she escaped. “Fight Night,” her eighth novel, finds its characters in the aftermath of it all: The suicides are long in the past, the Mennonite village long left behind. “What makes a tragedy bearable and unbearable is the same thing,” she writes, “which is that life goes on.”

“Fight Night” is the story of three generations of women as told by the youngest of them. Nine-year-old Swiv is a tangle-haired child who lives with her mother and grandmother, Elvira. Their voices course through her — she sometimes mimics their phrases in italics (“ entered menopause ,” “ fine fettle ,” “ nesting instinct ”), and sometimes holds a tape recorder directly up to Elvira as she tells “The Truth About Mom.” Toews is a master of dialogue, and she swirls the adults’ perspectives through Swiv’s imperfect ventriloquism as if she were mixing paints.

The book is written as a letter to Swiv’s absent father (“Dear Dad,” it begins, “How are you? I was expelled”), though he is so absent that even Swiv seems to forget this. The reader is pulled into the intimacy of a dysfunctional family whose unconditional love would make any truly dysfunctional family jealous. The three women stand alone, together, against the universe, so closely molded against one another’s jagged edges that their individual outlines blur. Swiv’s mother is pregnant, and her mood swings shake the household; as Swiv puts it, “Mom goes scorched earth,” getting into arguments with strangers and gargling oregano oil to calm herself. She leaves Swiv a note quoting the British psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott by way of apology: “It is important to fail at mothering,” she writes, along with a smiley face and a “Ha! Ha!”

Elvira is a larger-than-life figure: Unafraid of death — of anything, really — she wears velour track suits and sprays passing cop cars with her garden hose. “Grandma jokes all the time and if she’s being serious she half-jokes,” Swiv writes. Elvira home-schools her in “How to Dig a Winter Grave,” sudoku, dream analysis and math, making up problems like calculating when their heights will meet (the solution to all equations, according to Elvira, being “who knows”).

Swiv’s voice sounds far older than her 9 years, which is understandable given the responsibility she shoulders. She cares for her grandmother, tending to her “hard, crispy feet,” lifting up her rolls of flesh to bathe her, combing back her soft white baby hair, serving as “Grandma’s human walker,” measuring out her heart medications and picking up the pills Elvira scatters with a gleeful “Bombs away!” Swiv’s anxieties pulse under the narration — she knows her grandmother will die, and worries her mother will kill herself as Swiv’s aunt and grandfather did. The book holds onto the past while leaving it beneath the veil — the methods of those suicides are referenced only inscrutably, the Mennonites are named only as the “town of escaped Russians,” Elvira’s native Plautdietsch is referred to only as her “secret language.” The real pathos of the book is in the present tense, in the child who grows up too fast.

Toews’s flavor profile of choice is the bittersweet, the tragicomic. “He looked sad and happy at the same time. That’s a popular adult look,” Swiv notes. “Do you know Shakespeare’s tragedies?” Elvira asks. “People like to separate his plays into tragedies and comedies. Well, jeepers creepers! Aren’t they all one and the same?” The deeper the wound, the more urgent the imperative toward the light. This book lives so much further from the flame than some of Toews’s others that the sweet threatens to overpower the bitter, to edge toward the saccharine. The pregnant mother, the dying grandmother — the end is in sight from the beginning, and Toews doesn’t steer away from a climax that knots the bow too perfectly. Elvira is the name of Toews’s real mother, for whom the book is a love song, without anger, though with a lot of pain. “Mom and Grandma know things about each other that they just have to contend with because that’s how it is,” Swiv writes. “They don’t mind. They know each other.” If the book’s overwhelming tenderness makes the reader cry, they’ll be, as Swiv’s mother teaches her, “ tears of happiness. ”

One of the foundational tenets of the Mennonites is pacifism, to which the novel feels like an explicit reaction. “We’re a family of fighters,” both Swiv’s mother and grandmother tell her. In Toews’s previous novel, “ Women Talking ,” the women of a Mennonite colony in Bolivia debate how they will respond to a series of horrific rapes. They give themselves two options: stay and fight or leave. They go, unable to conceive of what it would mean to fight. In “Fight Night,” the women understand that it means to survive. “Joy, said Grandma, is resistance ,” Swiv writes. “Oh, I said. To what? Then she was off laughing again and there was nothing anybody could do about it.”

Nadja Spiegelman is the author of “I’m Supposed to Protect You From All This” and several comics for children. Previously the online editor of The Paris Review, she is the editor in chief of Astra Magazine, an international print quarterly forthcoming in 2022.

FIGHT NIGHT By Miriam Toews 251 pp. Bloomsbury. $24.

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Fight Night by Miriam Toews review: The funniest, smartest novel you’ll read this year

This brilliantly clever, empathetic and big-heated novel blazes a bright trail which many will imitate but few will match, writes Chris Deerin.

Photo: Dev Asangbam on Unsplash

There are things one can reliably expect from a Miriam Toews novel: a precocious and disturbed child in a lead role, a mysteriously vanished family member, at least one suicide, and the ability to take subject matter of the darkest kind and illuminate it with joyful, razor-sharp humour.

Fight Night meets all these expectations, and then some. It is the funniest, most life-affirming and most virtuosic novel I expect to read this year. I doubt I’ll read a better novel, full stop.

Swiv is its nine-year-old protagonist, kooky, curious and wise beyond her years. She is suspended from school for scrapping – “Madame said I had one too many fights, which if I knew the exact number of fights I was supposed to have then there wouldn’t be this bullshit” – and is nominally in the care of her velour-tracksuited grandmother, Elvira (her heavily-pregnant actress mother swoops in and out, her father has disappeared). 

Every sharply-turned sentence and passage of dialogue fizzes with invention, imparting the book a chaotic energy

In practice, the relationship works the other way round. Elvira is a huge character, both physically and in personality, so sick she survives only by consuming galactic amounts of pills each day, but showing blithe disregard for the prospect of death – “she says when she kicks the bucket I should just put her in a pickle jar and go outside and play already,” reports Swiv.

Poor Swiv has the task of helping her gran get around and even bathe: “I have to lift up her rolls of fat to get in the creases and even wash her giant butt and boobs and the bottom of her hard, crispy feet.” Meanwhile, Elvira cackles her way through what the reader knows to be borrowed time, passing on a wild lifetime’s worth of unconventional skills and wisdom to her grand-daughter.

There is so much to love about Fight Night. Every sharply-turned sentence and passage of dialogue fizzes with invention, imparting the book a chaotic energy.

The empathy that softens the jagged comedy, so visible in Toews’ great past works such as All My Puny Sorrows and The Flying Troutmans, does its job again here. Swiv, her mother and Elvira are a dysfunctional family unit that survive on profound mutual love. They will live on in your mind, as they have in mine. Read it, then read the rest of Toews’s staggering back catalogue.

@chrisdeerin

Fight Night by Miriam Toews is published June 2 on Faber & Faber

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FIGHT NIGHT

by Miriam Toews ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 2021

Funny and sad and exquisitely tender.

The author of Women Talking (2018) lets a 9-year-old girl have her say.

The first thing to know about this novel is that it’s narrated by a child writing to her father, who seems to have abandoned her and her pregnant mother. The novel-as-long-letter can often feel gimmicky, it’s difficult to craft a child’s voice that is both authentic and compelling, and it would not be unreasonable for readers to be wary of a book that attempts both. Readers familiar with Toews, however, may guess—correctly—that she’s quite capable of meeting the formal challenges she’s set for herself. “Mom is afraid of losing her mind  and killing herself but Grandma says she’s nowhere near losing her mind and killing herself.” This is Swiv talking. “Grandpa and Auntie Momo killed themselves, and your dad is somewhere else, those things are true.” This is Swiv’s Grandma talking. “But we’re here! We are all here now.” This exchange captures the central concerns of this charming, open-hearted book. Swiv’s mother—an actor—is a bundle of angst, rage, and stifled ambition. Swiv’s grandmother, on the other hand, is the embodiment of joie de vivre, and it’s Grandma with whom Swiv spends most of her time, filling the roles of caretaker and (sometimes reluctant) accomplice. Grandma is the type of person who befriends everyone she meets and who finds the joy in even the most ridiculous and—to her granddaughter—mortifying experiences. As the novel progresses, we discover that this ebullience isn’t the natural product of a happy life but, rather, the result of a conscious decision to endure terrible loss without becoming hard. We also come to learn why Swiv’s mom is so brittle. And we understand that Grandma, in all her glorious ridiculousness, is showing Swiv that the only way to survive is to love.

Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-63557-817-1

Page Count: 272

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Review Posted Online: July 9, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2021

LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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by Kristin Hannah

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SEEN & HEARD

by Sally Rooney ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2024

Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.

Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.

Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.

Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024

ISBN: 9780374602635

Page Count: 464

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024

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BookBrowse Reviews Fight Night by Miriam Toews

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Fight Night

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• Oct 5, 2021, 272 pages
• Jan 2023, 272 pages

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A bighearted and expansive yet intimate novel about three generations of women learning about the meaning of family, life and love.

Miriam Toews has already established herself as a powerful writer of women-centered narratives, and Fight Night is another incredible work to add to the canon. It's both refreshing and necessary to read a novel in which women are the main characters while men are offstage supporting characters that the women reflect upon to propel their own growth and development. When the novel begins, it's a difficult time for nine-year-old Swiv, who has been suspended from school and is dealing with an absent father and a depressed mother. Swiv learns why her father left her family through her mother and grandmother, Elvira, and she also comes to understand the changing family dynamics by communicating with her yet-to-be-born baby brother, Gord. Swiv's insightful and youthful first-person narrative is interspersed with the voices of other family members — sometimes in the form of letters, or emotionally charged monologues — as they all speak to one another, including some who are dead or yet to be born. Through these novel methods of communication, the family's tumultuous past gradually unfurls. Spanning three generations and two continents, one might not immediately recognize the monumental vastness of the themes and truths that Toews is exploring within Fight Night . This is because we are gleefully and gently guided through the events that unfold by Swiv as she tries to make sense of the world. The main thing that stands out is how incredibly funny this novel is — and that's the only way that Toews can draw out such serious and heartbreaking truths about life, by soothing us with humor and the small observations that bring joy and connection. Otherwise, how else can we face the unavoidable realities of life — that people will die, relationships will be lost, and we will inevitably let each other down, no matter how hard we try not to. It is this balance between levity and gravity that Toews skillfully maintains as she introduces us to Swiv and Elvira, whose relationship embodies the paradoxical contradictions of life. They are young and old, caretaker and cared for. Swiv is precocious and burdened more than she should be for her tender age, and Elvira is old and deteriorating in health, but she frequently behaves with more exuberance and youth than Swiv. The relationship between the two as they embark on a journey from Canada to California to visit family shows how these polarities coexist, even when they are constantly pushing and pulling against each other. Swiv is frequently embarrassed by and frustrated with Elvira, she simultaneously loves and hates her, and she vacillates between feeling oppressed and needing her grandmother's dependence. As Swiv tries to fight these contrasting realities of her life and her family, Fight Night culminates in a dramatic conclusion that provides deep clarity and meaning. It ties together the hodgepodge of seemingly random events, characters, word associations and references that unfold throughout the novel. This book helps us realize that love is big enough to encompass it all — all of the contradictions, messiness, tragedies and joys in life, spanning from the smallest and bawdiest of jokes to the most significant of events. Ultimately, this is why one lives, why one constantly fights to reconcile, balance, and find meaning — to reach this type of expansive love that transcends generations and the cycles of birth, life and death.

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Fight Night by Miriam Toews, review: A funny, fraught novel that left me shaken by its power

The canadian author's latest is a darkly funny book about the lives of three generations of women in toronto.

Family relationships between women were at the heart of the Canadian writer Miriam Toews’ most famous novel, All My Puny Sorrows . Her next novel, 2018’s Women Talking , which is being adapted by the director Sarah Polley for a film starring Frances McDormand, was based on the true story of women who suffered sexual abuses in a Mennonite Christian community.

Now, Toews sets her eighth novel in a close-knit family of three Toronto women – eight or nine year-old Swiv, her heavily pregnant mother and elderly grandmother – who are all irreverent, gutsy and convinced that, as Grandma says, they must “fight to love”.

The narrator Swiv has taken Grandma’s advice too literally and been suspended from school for fighting. Swiv has “blue Nike swooshes under my eyes”, although you wouldn’t know she was tired from her verbal energy, curiosity and care for the adults around her. Her father is absent – “fighting fascists”, Swiv’s mother claims – and parts of the novel are addressed to him.

Swiv is being homeschooled by Grandma, whose lessons take the form of an “editorial meeting”, where she and Swiv give each other writing assignments (“She said a hexameter is a poem with a curse built into it…”). There are also practical lessons, such as “how to dig a grave in winter”, and maths class: “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?”

Swiv isn’t getting much orthodox schooling but she’s learning about life, adults, ageing, deception and death. The latter haunts her family, not only as Grandma approaches the end of her life but also in the older woman’s memories of the traumatic events she experienced growing up.

It is notoriously difficult to pull off a child narrator and Swiv’s voice is probably too knowing for somebody of her age. But there is so much warmth and wit here that, unless the reader is determined to find reasons not to enjoy themselves, they should let such quibbles pass.

At its strongest, Swiv’s voice is deadpan and hypnotic: “Embrace your humanity, Grandma, I said. I whispered it into her fat. I told her the next day I’d help her shower and we could use Mom’s expensive Italian shower gel. Mom wouldn’t notice because she was too preoccupied with going insane.”

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Toews offers little in the way of plot but that’s fine in a novel which with great intensity charts the passage of time and fluctuating emotions around three characters’ lives at a turning point.

It’s funny, fraught, and it slowly becomes apparent that Swiv is the kind of child who feels embarrassed and worried because she thinks the adults around her aren’t conscientious enough. There is sadness and comedy in this: “I prayed everyone would be too drunk to remember this day but not so drunk they would die,” she says while accompanying Grandma on an unlikely trip to California that leads to the novel’s frenetic denouement.

This is not Toews’ best novel but it is entertaining and affecting, fiction written in and about the teeth of life, packed into 250 pages. I felt bereft on finishing it and shaken by its power. Toews has created a memorable and messy family but perhaps one of the many wise points here is that all families are these things.

Fight Night by Miriam Toews, published by Faber & Faber, £14.99

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Karissa Reads Books

Book Review: Fight Night by Miriam Toews

I received an Advance Readers’ Copy of this book thanks to the publisher and to NetGalley. All opinions are my own.

Swiv is 9-years-old. She lives with her mother, who is in her third trimester of pregnancy, and her grandmother. Swiv is writing a letter to her dad, who has recently disappeared out of their lives. This is an assignment given to her by her grandmother after Swiv is expelled from school. The letter conceit is easily forgotten but it gives us an excuse to get deep into Swiv’s head and her perspective. She is just on the cusp of the age where she is beginning to be deeply embarrassed by the adults around her while still loving them intensely. With a very pregnant mother and an aging grandmother, Swiv feels it is her responsibility to keep everyone alive and make sure things run smoothly.

This is a story light on plot and heavy on character. Swiv, her mother, and especially her grandmother are all larger than life characters. Swiv’s mother and grandmother each have their own traumas and fears that they carry with them, things that Swiv is not yet entirely aware of.

In my opinion, it’s really the character of the grandmother who carries this novel. She is vivacious and eccentric. She knows she is closer to the end of her life than the beginning and lives accordingly, in spite of Swiv’s constant concerns. She is a woman who has a broad and vivd history, entirely believable even when we aren’t given the details. Readers of Toews’ work will recognize the Mennonite background that Elvira comes from. Where other books by Toews have focused on strict and traditional Mennonite communities, here we see a woman who has left beyond the restrictions and abuses of her former community so that our narrator, Swiv, knows almost nothing of what that environment can be like.

Another theme found here that is shared with Toews previous work (notably All My Puny Sorrows ) is suicide. Both Swiv’s grandfather and aunt committed suicide, something that haunts Swiv’s grandmother and mother. In some ways, this is the fight that the title of the book references – a constant fight to stay in your own life, to battle against the forces that might bring you down, whether those are surrounding you or within you. Part of the fight, as we see through the mother and grandmother, is done on behalf of the children who may follow behind you.

Readers who love Toews’ work will find Fight Night very much in line with her previous work, full of new characters to love.

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15 thoughts on “Book Review: Fight Night by Miriam Toews”

I haven’t read anything by Toews yet but I’ve heard great things, and this one sounds equally intriguing. Great review!

Thanks! This one has just been longlisted for the Giller Prize, which is probably the highest Canadian literary honour.

Great review – I’ll be giving this one a miss as I *really* disliked All My Puny Sorrows, but I do like the premise. It’s rare to write a believable child narrator who’s still interesting to read in an adult novel, but the way you describe her having this intense sense of responsibility for her family while also being embarrassed by them is something I have seen in a lot of children her age.

That’s probably a good idea as I think some of the themes Toews explores here are similar to All My Puny Sorrows. I can’t quite land on whether or not I like her work but I do admire it. The voice here is really well done and, like you, I haven’t quite seen a narrator like Swiv before. Toews really captures that love and embarrassment that we’ve all felt over our families before!

You’ve got my attention with the mention of Mennonite people. The college I’m currently attending is a Mennonite school. I know the undergrad students have to attend chapel 10 times per semester, and the whole place is super focused on sustainability and world cultures. However, I’m not sure what Mennonite culture itself looks like. Do you think think this author captures that?

I didn’t know that! It is something you notice much on campus or is it more just part of their history now?

I’m not super versed on Mennonite history and culture but as far as I see it there are 2 streams of Mennonites. There are the very strict Mennonites, with separation of men and women and the women cover their heads and they hold very traditional, patriarchal beliefs. Then there are the Mennonite Brethren who are a more modern version of that. They may be fairly traditional in their religious beliefs but otherwise live life as the rest of us. Peter and I briefly lived in a town with a lot of Mennonite background and we attended a Mennonite Brethren church there; people were always trying to place us by asking as our last name. Mennonites all seem to have surnames like Thiessen and Friesen. My experience has mostly been with Mennonite Brethren who are very family-oriented and cook amazing food!

I would say Toews work deals with the first strand of Mennonites, who are very strict, almost to the extent of a cult in that they are very removed from the rest of society. As with any group like that, it can lend itself to some serious abuses and that’s often where Toews focuses her work. In this particular book, the grandmother and the mother grew up immersed in that intense Mennonite community but left some time when the mother was still pretty young. So Swiv, our narrator, has very little personal experience with the Mennonites but we see through her the damage some of those ideas have caused for her extended family. I’d hesitate to paint all Mennonites with that same brush but I think Toews does capture the harm that can grow in such an extreme and isolated community.

Ooooooh, that does make for a compelling book. Where I grew up, we used to call Mennonites “Amish people with vans” because they looked and dressed like Amish people and lived that self-sustaining life in a small community, but they always had a huge van. I wondered, does each neighborhood have one van and everyone goes everywhere together? Even now, if I go to the mall 8 miles from my place, I will see Mennonite people, who look Amish and wear tennis shoes, at the mall. Shopping for what? I don’t know. I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS.

That’s really funny to me! Most of the Mennonites I know now are people who you wouldn’t look twice at on the street. Some of the older ladies keep their heads covered but even that is increasingly rare. I bet all those families have their own vans because once you have a certain number of kids, you can’t just stuff them in a minivan anymore!

Don’t think this sounds like one for me, but what you say about the Mennonites is interesting – it’s not a sect I’ve come across in either real life or fiction before. Are they similar to Amish people?

I would say they have plenty of similarities but are not quite so removed from the rest of the world as the Amish. They’re a group that initially left Germany and Russia due to religious persecution and I know there are some Mennonites in South America but I think they are largely a North American group.

[…] to Karissa for recommending Miriam Toews. My library does not have the audio copy of the book she recommended, so I got another popular novel by […]

Oh I want to read this book so bad! I’m being stubborn and refusing to review it electronically which means I’ll have to wait until the publisher takes pity on me and finally sends me a hard copy LOL

I’ve only read one other Toews novel, and I honestly can’t remember which on it is, although It’s not her most recent before this or All our Puny Sorrows – I want to read both of those too!

Hahaha! I sympathize with you though I took an e-copy myself. I know I’ve read A Complicated Kindness and All My Puny Sorrows and I feel like there is another one I’ve read but none of the others sound familiar.

I just finished this book a few days ago and I loved it. The grandmother and child duo works so well, and so many things made me giggle. It makes me want to read more Toews, but there are only a couple I haven’t read yet so I have to be careful to spread them out.

[…] Fight Night – Miriam Toews (Penguin Random House Canada, 2021) […]

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Fight Night Hardcover – October 5, 2021

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"Move over, Scout Finch! There’s a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv." - USA Today , "Best Books of the Year" "Toews is a master of dialogue." - New York Times Book Review , Editors' Choice "A revelation." -Richard Russo NPR Best Books of the Year * Shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize * Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Finalist * Indie Next Pick * Amazon Editors' Pick * Apple Book of the Month From the bestselling author of Women Talking and All My Puny Sorrows , a compassionate, darkly humorous, and deeply wise novel about three generations of women. “You’re a small thing,” Grandma writes, “and you must learn to fight.” Swiv’s Grandma, Elvira, has been fighting all her life. From her upbringing in a strict religious community, she has fought those who wanted to take away her joy, her independence, and her spirit. She has fought to make peace with her loved ones when they have chosen to leave her. And now, even as her health fails, Grandma is fighting for her family: for her daughter, partnerless and in the third term of a pregnancy; and for her granddaughter Swiv, a spirited nine-year-old who has been suspended from school. Cramped together in their Toronto home, on the precipice of extraordinary change, Grandma and Swiv undertake a vital new project, setting out to explain their lives in letters they will never send. Alternating between the exuberant, precocious voice of young Swiv and her irrepressible, tenacious Grandma, Fight Night is a love letter to mothers and grandmothers, and to all the women who are still fighting―painfully, ferociously― for a way to live on their own terms.

• Print length 272 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing
• Publication date October 5, 2021
• Dimensions 5.81 x 0.99 x 8.55 inches
• ISBN-10 1635578175
• ISBN-13 978-1635578171
• See all details

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Editorial reviews.

“Toews is a master of dialogue, swirling the adults’ perspectives through Swiv’s imperfect ventriloquism as if she were mixing paints.” - New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice “Ardent, hilarious, and moving.” - NPR.org “If the book’s overwhelming tenderness makes the reader cry, they’ll be, as Swiv’s mother teaches her, ‘tears of happiness.'” - Nadja Spiegelman, New York Times “A touching tribute to the matrilineal bond among three women of different generations.” - Los Angeles Times “Toews will make you cheer and sob for all concerned.” - Boston Globe “Go Grandma Elvira!” - Margaret Atwood via Twitter “The last book that made me cry. It took only a line or two to be reminded of why I read fiction and why I write it. Toews doesn’t simply narrate a story; she fashions a world.” - Joshua Ferris, The Guardian “A big-hearted, briskly paced family saga about the extraordinary love that binds three generations of free-spirited women together, and the tools and techniques that they’ve had to develop to survive.” - USA Today, "Best Books of the Year" “You wouldn’t think it’s possible to write a book about a family grappling with the legacy of mental illness that’s also hilarious. But Miriam is such a beautiful and funny writer. She really locates the comedy in difficult life situations. I recommend it [Fight Night] so highly.” - Rumaan Alam on NBC-TV TODAY, “What to Read” “I laughed and cried reading this book; I can’t think of a higher endorsement.” - BuzzFeed, “Best Books of the Year” “Toews can always see the light through the darkness, and with grace and tenderness and humor, tells how to live with it, really live.” - Literary Hub, “Favorite Books of the Year" “A love letter to our brave and brilliant matriarchs.” - Glamour “A novel as moving as it is full of humor . . . As Susan Cole, in Now Magazine, says, ‘Few authors mix humor and deep emotion with Toews’s skill.’” - The Millions, “Most Anticipated” “Miriam Toews [is] a master of the novel. Every book of hers is magic. This one’s magic is terrifying, perhaps even more than others, but it’s compelling and inescapable, demanding to be read.” - New York Journal of Books “Nobody writes books like Miriam Toews―you feel her characters down to the bone, and she can straddle the horrific to the humorous across a single sentence. Fight Night is a hymn to women fighting for themselves and their families.” - New York Public Library “Staff Pick” “Beguiling . . . [A] wonderful tragi-comic work of fiction.” - National Book Review “Gorgeous . . . Strong, vibrant matriarchs are hard enough to come by in literature. Even more so, when they are dynamic, hilarious, kind. [Fight Night] is a master class in confronting the darker corners of reality with acceptance and a view toward the future and toward expectation of joy.” - Feminist Book Club podcast “Fight Night brings it. Every corner of human emotion is nudged, awakened, revealed . . . This novel is a reminder of the full potential of a book to connect us to our humanity and to inspire us to fight another day.” - The Southern Bookseller Review “Fierce and funny, this gives undeniable testimony to the life force of family . . . a knockout.” - Publishers Weekly, starred review “[A] charming, open-hearted book . . . Funny and sad and exquisitely tender.” - Kirkus Reviews, starred review, "Best Fiction of the Year" “Brilliant . . . Toews gives Swiv a voice that is sophisticated, childlike and utterly believable. . . . the wonder of Fight Night is that it’s a warmhearted and inventive portrait of women who have learned to fight against adversity.” - BookPage, starred review “Women Talking author Toews is at the top of her game in this novel . . . [It's] fierce and funny, and gives undeniable testimony to the life force of family.” - Publishers Weekly, "Holiday Gift Guide" “[A] tightknit, funny, ferocious trio . . . This novel, with its stream-of-consciousness style, unfiltered raucous humor, and hard-won wisdom is the kind of reading that makes me evangelical. I adored the girl and the women in Fight Night and am grateful to Miriam Toews to bringing them so beautifully to life.” - Gilmore Guide to Books “In Fight Night as in her previous books, Miriam Toews is a genius. Her gigantic mind and heart are singular; her sentence-making powers, extraordinary. Living in a time when Toews is writing is a reason to rejoice.” - R.O. Kwon, author of THE INCENDIARIES “Fight Night is a headlong rush of a novel narrated by a precocious nine-year-old girl who is doing everything she can to keep her troubled mother from falling apart and her irrepressible grandmother alive. Tender, heart-wrenching, darkly funny, and ultimately joyful, this novel pulses with life.” - Christina Baker Kline, bestselling author of THE EXILES and ORPHAN TRAIN “Miriam Toews is wickedly funny and fearlessly honest . . . She is an artist of escape; she always finds a way for her characters, trapped by circumstance, to liberate themselves.” - The New Yorker “I read in one sitting, it was that good.” - Sarah Polley

About the Author

Product details.

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Bloomsbury Publishing; First Edition (October 5, 2021)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1635578175
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1635578171
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.81 x 0.99 x 8.55 inches
• #8,153 in Family Life Fiction (Books)
• #8,599 in Women's Domestic Life Fiction
• #27,224 in Literary Fiction (Books)

About the author

Miriam toews.

Miriam Toews was born and raised in Steinbach, Manitoba, Canada, the second daughter of Mennonite parents and a direct descendant of one of Steinbach's first settlers, Klaas R. Reimer, who arrived in Manitoba in 1874 from the Ukraine. Her best-selling novels, which include Fight Night, Women Talking, All My Puny Sorrows, and A Complicated Kindness, have won numerous literary awards: the Governor General's Award for Fiction, the Writers' Trust Engel/Findley Award, and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. She is also a three-time finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize. Toews had a leading role in the feature film, Silent Light, written and directed by Carlos Reygadas, and winner of the 2007 Cannes Jury Prize, an experience that informed her fifth novel, Irma Voth.

Customer reviews

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Customers say

Customers find the humor witty, bold, and irreverent. They also describe the story as relatable and memorable. Readers describe the book as heartfelt, emotional, and inspiring. They appreciate the wonderful portrayal of all the characters, which shine with authenticity.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

Customers find the humor in the book witty, bold, and irreverent. They also say it's one of the funniest books they've ever read. Readers appreciate the clever turns of phrase and endearing grandmother.

"... Humor , clever turns of phrase and even a sort of road trip.The relationships were what was best about this book...." Read more

"This is the best novel I've read in ages . And I only read excellent novels.The voice...." Read more

"...but I really got attached to the characters and I found it to be comical and heartbreaking in the same...." Read more

"The grandmother is super funny and endearing. She kept making me laugh out loud...." Read more

Customers find the story relatable, captivating, and memorable. They also say the emotional ending provides a satisfying conclusion.

"...There is an emotional ending which provides a satisfying conclusion ." Read more

"I chose a high rating because the story kept my attention , my interest from page one to the very end. Writing in the voice of a nine year old girl?!..." Read more

"...Bold. Irreverent. Wry. Captivating . Memorable. A winner!(And also, delivered how and when promised.)" Read more

" Loved the way this story was told . So relatable and easy to connect yourself to any of the characters...." Read more

Customers find the story heartfelt, comical, and heartbreaking. They say the ending provides a satisfying conclusion. Readers also mention the narrator is observant, empathetic, and hysterical.

"...There is an emotional ending which provides a satisfying conclusion." Read more

"...attached to the characters and I found it to be comical and heartbreaking in the same ...." Read more

"...And cry a bit, too. Swiv is an observant, empathetic , hysterical narrator whose voice and personality shine with authenticity...." Read more

"...Maybe we all have someone like her. The book was heartfelt , funny and inspiring." Read more

Customers find the characters wonderfully portrayed. They also appreciate the authenticity of the narrator's voice and personality.

"... Quirky characters , but not so quirky that they seem unrealistic (to me) - I could see myself related to any of them...." Read more

"...The imperfections, love and laughter were wonderfully portrayed in all the characters." Read more

"...observant, empathetic, hysterical narrator whose voice and personality shine with authenticity . She and Grandma Elvira make quite a memorable team...." Read more

Customers find the book insightful, inspiring, and refreshing. They also describe it as a believable story.

"...The author makes a continuous conversation, a stream of consciousness ,a believable story of a journey evolving into awakening strong family ties." Read more

"...Maybe we all have someone like her. The book was heartfelt, funny and inspiring ." Read more

"A most refreshing and emotional roller coaster of a novel. I love Swiv." Read more

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Fight Night by Miriam Toews

• Publication Date: January 31, 2023
• Genres: Fiction , Women's Fiction
• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• ISBN-10: 1635579783
• ISBN-13: 9781635579789
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New Regency’s Brad Pitt and Ed Norton gritty noir, Fight Club , is 25 years old and to celebrate there’s a 4K Ultra HD remaster overseen by David Fincher with plans for a theatrical re-release as well as a companion art book from the studio and Insight Editions.

The book features never-before-seen visuals, exclusive interviews, and rare behind-the-scenes content.

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