Miriam Toews’ wise, wonderful 'Fight Night' celebrates three generations of women

Move over, Scout Finch! There’s a new contender for feistiest girl in fiction, and her name is Swiv. She’s the 9-year-old narrator of Miriam Toews’ spectacular new novel, “Fight Night” (Bloomsbury, 251 pages, ★★★★ out of four, out Tuesday), and you’re not likely to forget her distinctive voice – wise, worried, precocious, profane – any time soon.

We get to know her through a long letter she’s writing to her absent father who, in a family with its fair share of mental illness, has struggled with demons of his own. Swiv has plenty of time to write it – and to look after her ailing grandma Elvira while her actor mom, Mooshie, goes to work – because she was suspended from school for fighting.

Not to worry. Grandma has taken charge of Swiv’s homeschooling with her customary exuberance, devising an idiosyncratic curriculum that emphasizes the writing and telling of stories. Grandma “says letters start off as one thing and become another thing,” Swiv tells her dad. Swiv, in turn, has assigned her mom and grandma to write letters to the unborn child that Mooshie is carrying, making her more volatile than ever. Or, as Swiv puts it, “Mom is in her third trimester. She’s cracking up.”

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Toews, an award-winning Canadian writer only slightly less renowned on this side of the border, is the author of seven previous novels, most recently 2018’s “Women Talking,” and one work of nonfiction. Many of them deal in one way or other with her unusual upbringing in a strict Mennonite sect in Steinbach, Manitoba, and the suicides of her father and sister. This one, set in Toronto, is no exception.

As Swiv recounts to her father the stories she hears at home, she naively reveals the systematic abuse, both physical and psychological, of women and children in the patriarchal religious society that her mother and grandmother fled. Their nemesis is Willit Braun, the sanctimonious, tyrannical leader of the church they belonged to, one of many men who “robbed us blind,” Elvira says.

“They stole our souls … they hung out their shingles as soul-savers even as they were destroying them … they took our life force. And so we fight to reclaim it … we fight to love ourselves … we fight for access to our feelings … we fight for access to God …,” Elvira tells Swiv as they set out on what will prove to be a fateful journey to visit Elvira’s nephews, Ken and Lou, in Fresno, California.

Despite the timeliness of Toews’ story – it resonates with #MeToo and calls to “Smash the patriarchy” – “Fight Night” is the farthest thing imaginable from a political diatribe. Toews, who began her writing career making radio documentaries, has created a vibrant, mostly female ensemble of eccentric, endearing voices, girls and women doing their best to stand up to the Willit Brauns of the world. Even the minor characters spring to life on the page.

With Swiv, Toews has perfectly captured the spongelike way kids absorb the language of adults (“Poor Grandma. Today she has the Triple Scoop Sundae. Gout, trigeminal neuralgia, angina. With a topping of arthritis”) while retaining their fundamental innocence. Swiv has only a fuzzy sense of politics – she says her mom won’t stand up for the national anthem “because Canada is a lie and a crime scene” – and the mere thought of sex between a man and a woman, which she’s forced to think about when she discovers a thong under cousin Ken’s bed, makes her shudder in horror.

Moving back and forth in time through her characters’ fragmentary memories, Toews has written 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.

Elvira carries around in her red purse a letter about God’s love that Mooshie wrote to her when she was 17 – a story that so inspires Swiv, she decides to write a similar note to her mom even though she didn’t grow up in the church that has loomed so large in her family’s history and “didn’t know anything about God.” As you might expect, that doesn’t deter her in the least.

“I could write something hopeful from Beyoncé,” she tells her dad, “and Mom could carry it around forever.”

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Fight Night': Miriam Toews’ wise, wonderful book celebrates women