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. Home is wherever Swiv and Elvira are together, their relationship an animating force of love, care, and hilarity. 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. 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. 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. Instead, the novel zeroes in on the women of the family: Swiv, her mother, and her grandmother, Elvira, who all live together in Toronto. The novel is written as a letter from Swiv to her absent father, who is presumably away “fighting fascists.” We never meet him.
This optimistic tone comes chiefly from our narrator: nine-year-old Swiv, whose voice is hilarious and wise beyond her years. 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. 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. It should be surprising that Fight Night, Miriam Toews’ eighth novel, is touted as a “feel good” book-the L.A.
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