"Joy, said Grandma, is Resistance": On Miriam Toews' "Fight Night"

Miriam Toews | Fight Night | Bloomsbury Publishing | 2021 | 272 Pages

It should be surprising that Fight Night, Miriam Toews’ eighth novel, is touted as a “feel good” book—the L.A. Times calls it the “Ted Lasso of novels, for better or worse.” After all, Toews’ work is frequently dark and spare; earlier novels like All My Puny Sorrows and Women Talking address topics of suicide and religious abuse. And Fight Night, like Toews’ previous work, picks up these same themes, as if Toews is writing the events of her life over and over again—a childhood in a restrictive Canadian Mennonite community, marked by both her father and sister committing suicide ten years apart—but daring to hope for a different ending, a different legacy.

This optimistic tone comes chiefly from our narrator: nine-year-old Swiv, whose voice is hilarious and wise beyond her years. The novel is written as a letter from Swiv to her absent father, who is presumably away “fighting fascists.” We never meet him. Instead, the novel zeroes in on the women of the family: Swiv, her mother, and her grandmother, Elvira, who all live together in Toronto. We watch them live regular life together, while navigating difficult situations—Swiv’s suspension from school, her mother’s pregnancy, and Elvira’s declining health. The book has a two-part structure, “Home” (which takes place in their actual home in Toronto) and “Away” (set in California), mirroring Swiv and grandma Elvira’s obsession with the Toronto Raptors. Yet even “Away” is still home—Swiv and her grandmother fly to California to visit Lou and Kenny, two of Elvira’s cousins, where they are just as at ease as in Canada. Home is wherever Swiv and Elvira are together, their relationship an animating force of love, care, and hilarity.

Yet for all of Fight Night’s focus on the family and its celebration of Swiv and Elvira’s bond, Toews’ novel suggests that we might be too quick to celebrate family as an unalloyed good. Family, like everything, is a place where tension and love coexist, where old wounds get passed down and played out. This is an antidote to the family worship of something like Gilmore Girls, which exalts the mother and daughter relationship to an extreme. And though Swiv is the narrator of the novel, it’s actually Elvira’s childhood that shapes Fight Night, her legacy evident in the lives of her daughter and granddaughter. Elvira grew up in a “town of escaped Russians,” a Low-German Mennonite community in rural Canada. The stories of Elvira’s town capture Swiv’s own imagination, often sprinkled with Plautdietsch phrases and recurring characters, like Willit Braun, a religious leader in the community, “the uber-schultz of the village who was a classic tyrant, pompous, authoritarian, insecure, frustrated.” It’s clear that for Toews and for Elvira, religious communities have an enduring hold, a legacy that is difficult to erase or move past. Alongside the celebration of three generations of bold, wild women, then, Fight Night draws attention to who we choose—and don’t choose—as kin, and how that affects our own families.

Toews herself grew up in a restrictive Canadian Mennonite community. I grew up in a less restrictive Dutch Reformed community in northeast Ohio, but the novel still resonates with me. Religious communities, whether or not you accept them as your own, shape how you see the world in fundamental ways—the voice of a youth pastor from my childhood still rattles around the edges of my brain, looping me into narratives of shame that I never claimed. For Elvira, this is a crime, forcing her into an inheritance she never wanted. In the one section that she narrates, speaking to the legacy of these narratives is a scene of fighting. Willit Braun is again the antagonist here, a stand-in for all the patriarchal figures of fundamentalist faith. Elvira says, talking into Swiv’s phone recorder, “That church in our town… those Willit Brauns. So smug. So certain. And they caused mass-scale tragedy. They were bandits. They crept in… crept in and tiptoed around in the dark… we couldn’t see what they were doing at the time but we felt it.” The smug certainty of the Willit Brauns of the world robs Elvira of her natural impulses: 

They took the beautiful things… right under our noses… crept in like thieves… replaced our tolerance with condemnation, our desire with shame, our feelings with sin, our wild joy with discipline, our agency with obedience, our imagination with riles, every act of joyous rebelling with crushing hatred, our impulses with self-loathing, our empathy with sanctimoniousness, threats, cruelty, our curiosity with isolation, willful ignorance, infantilism, punishment! Our fire with ashes, our love, our love with fear and trembling.

It’s clear that Elvira’s whole life—her raising of her two daughters, her involvement in Swiv’s upbringing, her irreverent sense of humor—has revolved around speaking back to those Willit Brauns. As Swiv writes, “Grandma told me that everything she was taught in her dumb town turned out to be lies. And when you figure that out you have to start all over again.” And Elvira does start all over again, but she can never fully leave the narratives or characters or even habits of the Mennonite church behind. Swiv tells us that Elvira “can’t really read the Bible anymore because when she reads it she only hears authoritarian old men’s voices. But she knows so much of it by heart and repeats to herself the verses that mean the most to her all the time.” Elvira doesn’t abandon the content of the Bible so much as the form that presented it to her—she fights to hear these verses in a new voice, to teach Swiv about a God that is not fire and brimstone but the personification of love. 

If Elvira wants to rewrite her life, to raise Swiv in a new narrative. She does this through an emphasis on fighting the old ones, fighting the communities that raised her. Given the Mennonite church’s emphasis on pacifism, her emphasis on fighting is a marked act of resistance. She tells Swiv that “we’re all fighters, our whole family. Even the dead ones. They fought the hardest.” If people who harmed you might still constitute you, Elvira teaches Swiv to fight back. But this fight is not only with the girls at school or the narratives passed down through generations or even with God. It’s a fight with yourself, for joy. She tells Swiv that “we need tragedy, which is the need to love and the need…not just the need, the imperative, the human imperative…to experience joy. To find joy and create joy. All through the night. The fight night.” 

For Elvira, the fight night is an opportunity for joy—a direct refusal of Psalm 30, which reads that “weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes in the morning.” Joy comes at night, without delay, for Elvira and Swiv, it comes wherever they are together. Elvira doesn’t deny but actively resists the enduring legacy of religious fundamentalism in favor of joy, in favor of love and absurdity and good humor. We see all of this get passed down to Swiv, and this inevitability is, perhaps, the great hope of the novel: “Joy, said Grandma, is resistance. Oh, I said. To what? Then she was off laughing again and there was nothing anybody could do about it.”