A Review of: Four Miriam Toews Novels

Format: 240pp, 256pp, 272pp, 288pp, paperbacks; Size: 5.0 x 8.0; Price: $16.95 each; Number of books: four; Publisher: Counterpoint Press; Author’s Relationship to Chicago Blackhawks Forward Jonathan Toews: Unconfirmed, so as to preserve hope;  Number of Families, Per Book, Trying Their Best Despite The Circumstances: 1; Representative Passage: “When Tash was four and I was a fat baby she threw herself out of a tree and broke her elbow in two places. She thought that God had saved her life. She could just as easily have broken her neck and died. Then she had wanted to throw me out of a tree to test God’s love and my mom said no, there are such things as accidents.”

Central Question: So, what are they gonna do about it?

In Miriam Toews’s debut novel, Summer of My Amazing Luck, she sends two of her characters and their combined five kids out on a road trip. Toews spends much of the lead up to the trip emphasizing the logistical difficulties that the adults, Lucy and Lish, have to navigate just to get on the road, and while things start off smoothly, Toews is just lulling readers into a false sense of confidence. Before long, things go badly, quickly:

In the fifteen minutes it took us to reach the border Letitia had removed her dress and panties and shoes and sat stoically, completely naked, in the back of the van. Alba was waving Letitia’s panties out of the window, threatening to show them to passerby. Letitia refused even to look at her, let alone take the bait and lunge for her panties. Hope and Maya were arguing about how many planets there are, nine or ten or thirteen or twenty-three, and Dill was back in his car seat chewing on an uncapped Crayola marker. A glorious fuchsia dye stained his lips, his teeth, his tongue, his cheeks, his hands, and his saliva, mixed with breast milk, was drooling out of the side of his mouth in fuchsia.

This scene is pure chaos, the sort of calamity that could befall most parents, given the right circumstances. One inconvenience follows another, and then another, until it seems that everything has spun out of control.

Toews has spent most of her career refining her portrayals of how disorder—both internal and societal—can so easily overtake the family. Now readers can observe this process of refinement through her first four novels, which Counterpoint Press reissued earlier this year. As Toews has matured as a writer, she’s excelled at demonstrating how easily control can slip from our grasp,...