Random House (Vintage Canada Edition)
Released: Trade paperback 2009
Page Count: 274 pp.
The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews
I thought about starting this review by saying something along the lines of Miriam Toews puts the fun back into dysfunctional when Hattie takes her psychotic sister’s kids, Logan and Thebes, on an epic road trip from Manitoba to California to find their long lost father in her latest novel The Flying Troutmans. But there’s more to Toews story than that. Behind the witty dialogue, however try-hard hip it may sound, is a beautifully dark story of loneliness, resentment, and, ultimately, optimism.
Hattie’s sister Min has always toyed with the idea of death. She’s wandered around on a cold snowy night with nothing but a night gown on, and almost drowned Hattie during a family vacation. However reckless her behaviour may have been, she’s always loved and cared for her kids. But, when Min stops eating and won’t get out of bed, Hattie comes back from Paris, where she had been living with a man who said they would communicate telepathically, and checks her sister into the psychiatric ward. Faced with taking care of her sister’s 15-year-old and 11-year-old, she opts for a road trip in the family Astro van to find the kids’ dad Cherkis, a man Min chased away just after the youngest, Thebes, was born.
Toews’ writing style is fluid in this book. She doesn’t use typical punctuation for dialogue, which adds to the flow of the text from present road trip to Hattie’s past experiences with Min that work well to reveal the fragile relationship they had together. It’s told in the past-tense, and it seems as though Hattie is retelling the story to someone, which could account for the lack of quotations around the dialogue.
It may sound a little cliché to point this out, but the road trip into the unknown was a great metaphor for the Troutmans. They had no where to go and no where to go home to. They had to find something new. As a result of this journey, Toews does a great job of unravelling character. Just when I thought I had something pegged, she spun my expectations around.
The Flying Troutmans is a fantastic book. Don’t read it expecting another A Complicated Kindness because you won’t get that. What you will get is a rich story that is as funny and crazy as it is sad and dark. You’ll feel for the Troutmans.
Reviewed by Taryn Hubbard
