Miriam Toews explores religious trauma through the voice of a nine-year-old

Canadian novelist Miriam Toews is a master of voice. She’s given readers the voices of eight women who were drugged and raped in Women Talking, the perspective of a 16-year-old desperate to escape her small town in A Complicated Kindness, and even a memoir written in the voice of her father after his death by suicide. Fight Night, her latest novel, traverses what is for Toews familiar territory: mental health, women hurt by men, and religious trauma and its aftershocks.

Voice is what makes this novel unique. Narrated by a child experiencing the effects of her grandmother’s and mother’s hurts, it’s an account of secondary religious trauma, damage at a remove. It offers one answer to a question my friends and I are always asking each other: What do our unraveled and rewoven faith lives look like to our kids?

The narrator of Fight Night doesn’t have a language of faith to take apart or put back together. She’s still building hers, constructing it one word at a time as she listens to her mother and grandmother. The gift of this book is the perspective of nine-year-old Swiv, whose voice is by turns confused, embarrassed, blunt, funny—and always concrete. (When her grandmother sings about leaving her heart in San Francisco, Swiv wonders, “How you could leave your heart in some city and then sing about it because you’d obviously be dead.”)