Fight Night by Miriam Toews
Swiv is a perfect daughter. Her mother is a perfect daughter. Her grandmother is outrageous! From the outside, they don’t look perfect, but Miriam Toews brings us inside this passionate family. Every night is Fight Night.
Almost a teenager, Swiv has learned alternate ways of expressing her emotions from counselors. But once she has run through all the techniques, she lets loose! Verbally and physically – just like she learned at home.
Expelled from school for challenging a teacher once too often, she has lots of time to care for her mother, pregnant with Gord, and her grandmother. Her mother is an actress, who goes off to work, where she also challenges authority – in the person of the play’s director. At home she can’t always control herself, but at work she can and does.
Grandma is deaf, which means life with her is lived at full volume! She loudly laughs off every complaint, whether her own or other people’s. Physical disabilities are ignored or ridiculed, because she won’t let them ruin her life. She adores Swiv and Gord (in utero).
All three generations profoundly love each other. Through all the disorganized rubble of living, they support each other when they need it. They can rail at each other and inconvenience each other with breathtaking drama, but they are perceptive and hone in on real hurt when it is there.
Once we have been fully introduced to the family, we join Swiv and Grandma on their mad-cap trip to California to visit two of Grandma’s nephews. Everyone who has boarded a plane will laugh out loud at the wonderfully hilarious vision of poor Swiv getting Grandma on the plane and into her seat. The exhausted girl falls asleep in flight and wakes upon arrival to discover that Grandma has made acquaintance with almost everyone on the plane.
Swiv is a superb narrator and character. Not to bore the reader, she leaves out certain events, only to telegraph them by tension-inducing summaries. Suffice to say, Grandma and Mom end up in the same hospital with a confused Swiv running around being the perfect girl for both of them.
