Faith and works in A Complicated Kindness

I am fascinated by how Miriam Toews weaves seemingly trivial outward details into her novel A Complicated Kindness. Even from the very beginning she bestows significance on the mundane, characterizing Trudie through a series of details about her habits and preferences. “She liked a made bed,” Nomi narrates. “She had an uncanny ability to predict the weather. She’d snap towels viciously before folding them, often very close to our heads as we sat watching TV” (18). By describing her character only in terms of these minor outward characteristics, Toews suggests that these small visible traits are emblematic of deeper inward features.

 In this small Mennonite community, those outward characteristics are only that—an expression of the far-more-important workings inside people. Nomi says, “The Mouth came to our house one evening to tell my sister that her physical self was irrelevant” (115). The body can be completely disregarded until it becomes valued for its own merits instead of for its expression of oneness with a person’s internal faith—in this case it needs to be reformed, according to the conservative Mennonite doctrine in Nomi’s town. In other words, the outward things that people do must be expressive of their inner faith; thus, Trudie is expected to volunteer and prepare church potlucks. Outer characteristics or actions can never be valued unless they are connected to the correct, church-ordained inner purposes. This in some ways seems like the good-works approach to salvation that Mennonites often take. If these characters express their faith by volunteering for the church enough and retaining outward appearances of physical purity, then they will receive God’s—and the community’s—favor.

Miriam Toews

But in other places in the novel Nomi describes a more faith-based approach to salvation. She and Tash try to get their parents to say the word “party,” and Tash gets really angry when they won’t say it. “Things shouldn’t hinge on so very little,” says Nomi. “But I guess if you can die without understanding how it happened then you can also live without a complete understanding of how. And in a way that’s kind of relaxing” (114). Nomi speculates that maybe all that her parents would have had to do to make them a happy family forever would be to say the word “party” that day. Similarly, all a Christian has to do to attain everlasting happiness is express a commitment to God. Given all of the underlying problems within Nomi’s family and the community, however, the idea that one word could repair all that seems a little far-fetched; perhaps the reader is to believe that salvation by faith alone is equally unbelievable.

I’m really not sure what Toews is trying to say about the whole works versus faith debate—or maybe she’s not trying to say anything about it. Maybe she is just implying that this ideal of salvation is, in general, a little unattainable.