The flying Troutmans

Miriam Toews, 1964-

Book - 2008

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Review by New York Times Review

SOMEHOW, despite high gas prices, creeping traffic and exasperating construction delays, the road that presumably goes on forever has remained a reliable source of freedom dreams, pop songs and plot-lite fiction. In Miriam Toews's fourth novel, "The Flying Troutmans," a family of damaged, misfit Manitobans pile into a Ford Aerostar and take a meandering trip across the Western United States - South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, California - and on down to the Mexican border, a journey of a few thousand miles that ends up seeming like several million. I blame the disagreeable company and the vapid conversation. Hattie Troutman, Toews's narrator, is a Canadian expat living in Paris and "pretending to be an artist" while missing (yet not really pining for) her "moody, adjective-hating" ex-boyfriend. Late one night, she receives a collect distress call. Her older sister, Min, has suffered another psychotic breakdown. Despite the fact that it was Min's chronic misery and sororicidal tendencies that sent Hattie fleeing to Europe, she flies home to arrange for her sister's hospitalization and take care of - or more precisely, Hattie being a markedly immature 28-year-old, hang out with - her neglected and emotionally injured niece and nephew. Thebes, 11, is an unhygienic (no baths, ever) purple-haired motor mouth covered in fake tattoos; she's also an incipient cutter who regrets being born. Logan, 15 and "all jacked up on rebellion," wears headphones and face-hiding black hoodies, and is, for no apparent reason (perhaps because he likes short Q.&A. interviews?), romantically smitten with Deborah Solomon, the New York Times Magazine columnist. Not long after Hattie's arrival, he's also expelled from high school. Recalling her own grisly childhood (the time Min tried to drown her in Acapulco, the time Min locked her out of the house in subzero temperatures), Hattie at first seems to be struggling to dig deeply enough into her sister's grievances and instability to understand what it is that whips her into the frightening tirades that almost always end in stupor and despair. But that all turns out to be just solipsistic melancholy. Overwhelmed by the situations both at Min's house (where Thebes and Logan quarrel and sulk, isolate themselves and bounce off the walls) and at the hospital (where Min begs her sister to help her die), Hattie impulsively gases up the family van and drives the kids down into the States to search for their father, a long-gone gentle goofball whose last known whereabouts was "an art gallery in the middle of a field somewhere outside Murdo, S.D." They hit a deer, pick up a hitchhiker, adopt a pit bull. Logan carves his complaints into the minivan's dashboard with a penknife. He breaks his wrist. Thebes looks up words in the dictionary that she carries around, recites definitions and etymologies. She makes giant novelty checks with cardboard, scissors and crayons. Again and again Hattie calls the hospital from the strangely plentiful public telephones she finds along the highway and is repeatedly told that Min is unavailable. This happens, then this happens, then this, but nothing that happens ever complicates the journey in any major or unexpected way, or creates serious obstacles. Thebes and Logan's father, it turns out, left South Dakota years ago, but no problem - a former neighbor conveniently remembers that he moved to Twentynine Palms, Calif. Later, his helpful ex-girlfriend directs the travelers to their ultimate destination: a town farther south where he has joined a group of anarchists "keeping track of and documenting the actions and injustices of the U.S. Border Patrol." For some reason or another. Improbable characters flash in and flash out, signifying nothing: the waitress in Kingman, Ariz., who mesmerizes the Troutmans with the sad tale of her teenage abortion and scarred Fallopian tubes; the casserole-baking neo-hippie in Flagstaff who was fired from his job at a religious radio station after "translating Cheech and Chong dialogues into Spanish and airing them late at night"; the loutish "family of haters" at a rodeo and carnival in Cheyenne who warn Thebes "to sit down and stay down, they'd paid their money to see the bronco bustin' and dang if they were gonna have some wild foreign retard leapin' up every second and blockin' their view." Dang? Caricatures are bad enough, but most of the ones drawn here seem to be out of date by 40 or 50 years. And speaking of being out of date, when was the last time an 11-year-old girl could walk into a grocery store in Utah, as Thebes does, and buy a bottle of wine? The vernacular narrative, which had spark, specificity and rueful wit throughout the novel's opening chapters, becomes sloppy and gabbling, like a blog hastily banged out. Pop culture references, an indiscriminate barrage of them, too often substitute for clear exposition ("Thebes had taken all her filthy, sweaty hair and sculpted it upwards like a Smurf's and stuck a Sharpie through it Pebbles Flintstone-style and even from a distance I could hear her say, Bro, what's a Lynyrd Skynyrd?"). Hattie's observations, her endless asides, turn petty, strained and trite: "I remembered that this was the United States and all that would happen was that we'd get our faces blown off and die instantly." Toews's penchant for summarized dialogue becomes tedious and distancing, turning scenes into virtual digests, and her inability, or unwillingness, to describe or contextualize - or even to gaze long upon - the passing countryside, is a real handicap when you're writing a road novel. "I drove through the park as fast as I could, which was excruciatingly slowly because the road was narrow and curvy and park rangers were all over the place. It was all desert and sky and scrubby bushes and some oddly shaped trees." And that's it for the spectacular Joshua Tree National Park. By the time she delivers her semi-wild charges to a preposterously happy reunion with their dad (and who knew it could be so darn easy to find someone in the desert! - all you have to do is keep going till you come upon "a group of people sitting around cooking something on a camp stove" and there he'll be, just waiting), Hattie Troutman has had her long anticipated, if completely unearned, life-changing epiphany. "I had a new career. I had a mission. I'd become a cartographer of the uncharted world of Min" - despite the fact that she left Min lying zonked out on a battery of meds in a scary hospital to go barreling across the United States - "and I'd raise her from the dead, like a baby, sort of." (I don't know what that means, either.) "When she was well enough to take control, she could throw me out, plot her own course, and I wouldn't stand in her way. And I wouldn't help her to die." Sounds uplifting, except from the start we've known that Hattie would never help her sister die. There was never any question about it. Finally, nothing about "The Flying Troutmans" feels authentic, not the characters and not their psychology, and certainly not the American landscape they blast through, leaving dust in the slipstream, but very little else. A family of damaged, misfit Manitobans takes a meandering trip across the Western United States. Tom De Haven teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University and is the author of the Derby Dugan trilogy of novels.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

Is suicide a choice or a foregone conclusion? When Hattie rushes home to Canada, she is not exactly perturbed by the sight of her sister, who has been languishing in a sickly stew of depression. As Hattie acknowledges, Min's been traveling in two opposite directions at once, towards infancy and death since forever, and it is Hattie's job to pick up the pieces. After tenderly depositing her sister in the psych ward, Hattie surveys the scene at home featuring Thebes, the eccentric, purple-haired 11-year-old with a penchant for hyperbole and hip-hop vernacular, and Logan, the staunchly silent yet preternaturally wise teenage nephew. A fear of social workers sparks Hattie to pack the minivan and take her sister's kids west on an off-kilter road trip. Destination: their long-lost father. Misadventures, many very funny, plague the scarred but resilient Troutmans. Toews (A Complicated Kindness, 2004) excels here at comedic sophistication, all while masterfully embedding explorations of madness, truth, and the immense sorrow that comes from caring for someone who is derailed by mania's devious tug.--Cook, Emily Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

A road novel helped along by a lovably nutty cast, Toews's latest (after A Complicated Kindness) follows a ragtag crew as they crisscross America. Hattie, recently dumped in Paris by her moody, adjective-hating boyfriend, returns home to Canada after receiving an emergency phone call from her niece. Turns out, Hattie's sister, Min, is back in the psych ward, and her kids, 11-year-old Thebes and 15-year-old Logan, are fending for themselves. Thus the quirky trio--purple-haired, wise-beyond-her-years Thebes, recently expelled brother Logan and overwhelmed Hattie--embark on a road trip to the States to find the kids' long-missing father. What follows is a Little Miss Sunshine-like quest in which the characters learn about themselves and each other as they weather car repairs, sleazy motel rooms and encounters with bizarre people. Toews's gift for writing precocious children and the story's antic momentum redeem the familiar set-up, and if the ending feels a bit rushed, it's largely because it's tough to let Toews's characters go. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

The Troutman world is falling apart--again. Mentally ill Min is bed-ridden and suffering from paranoid delusions; her 15-year-old son, Logan, is in trouble at school; and her 11-year-old daughter, Thebes, is trying and failing to hold it all together. Enter a reluctant and clueless Aunt Hattie, recently dumped by her boyfriend in the City of Light, and the stage is set for this latest book by Toews (Boy of Good Breeding). After the suicidal Min is carried to the hospital, Hattie decides to take the kids on a road trip across the Canadian border into America to find the children's AWOL father. The odyssey is laced with moments of grief and dotted with the quirky places, people, and incidents one might expect to find on a circuitous journey through the hinterlands of the vast American West. Ultimately, the long road leads to the beginning of healing and the faith and strength to keep carrying on. Engaging, humorous, grim, and redemptive, this is essential reading; recommended for public libraries.--Jyna Scheeren, Troy P.L., NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Emulating the comedic stylings of indie hits like Little Miss Sunshine provides a wealth of material and a breath of fresh air for Canadian novelist Toews (A Boy of Good Breeding, 2006, etc). "Yeah, so things have fallen apart," declares reluctant narrator Hattie Troutman, summarizing her situation with a postmodern echo of Yeats' famous lament. Yanked from her Parisian fantasy life as an expatriate living with her leech of a boyfriend, prodigal sibling Hattie rushes home to Manitoba when her sister Min is hospitalized with another catatonic bout, symptomatic of a lifelong mental illness. Hattie is marooned with Min's 11-year-old daughter Thebes, a goofy smart aleck with a predilection for busting into gangsta rap, and 15-year-old son Logan, a moody renegade who channels his aggression into basketball. Absent of maternal instincts, Hattie decides the best course of action is a road trip to find the kids' long-absent father, Doug Cherkis. Commandeering a beat-up van, the trio travels through the alien landscapes of Cheyenne, Moab and Twentynine Palms in search of the anarchic artist who reportedly spawned the lesser Troutmans. Life on the road doesn't increase Hattie's affection toward her charges. "I thought: Strangle the children, dump their bodies in the ditch," she notes early in her voyage. With barbed wit, Toews plunders some of the emotional themes from her earlier work, among them absent fathers, the trials of adolescence and the tribulations of single motherhood. The story feels suspiciously directionless much of the time. Fortunately, the snappy personalities of Hattie's charges and the odd collection of ramblers, Jesus freaks and vagabonds they encounter make for entertaining interludes between the deliciously uncomfortable silences of the book's primary characters. Smarter and more thoughtful than its cinematic inspirations. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

one yeah, so things have fallen apart. A few weeks ago I got a collect call from my niece, Thebes, in the middle of the night, asking me to please come back to help with Min. She told me she'd been trying to take care of things but it wasn't working any more. Min was stranded in her bed, hooked on blue torpedoes and convinced that a million silver cars were closing in on her (I didn't know what Thebes meant either), Logan was in trouble at school, something about the disturbing stories he was writing, Thebes was pretending to be Min on the phone with his principal, the house was crumbling around them, the back screen door had blown off in the wind, a family of aggressive mice was living behind the piano, the neighbours were pissed off because of hatchets being thrown into their yard at all hours (again, confusing, something to do with Logan) . . . basically, things were out of control. And Thebes is only ­eleven. I told her I'd be there as soon as I could. I had no choice. There was no question. Our parents are dead. Min didn't have anybody else. And in just about every meaningful way, neither did I. Admittedly, I would have preferred to keep roaming around Paris pretending to be an artist with my moody, ­adjective-­hating boyfriend, Marc, but he was heading off to an ashram in India anyway and said we could communicate telepathically. I tried it a couple of days before he left. I love you, don't go, I said silently, without moving my lips. He was standing next to me, trying to photograph a gargoyle. You're a little in my way, he said. Can you move? No amount of telepathy worked with him, but maybe you have to be thousands of miles away from someone in order for your thoughts to work up the speed and velocity required to hit their ­target. At the airport, Thebes came running over to me dressed entirely in royal blue terry cloth, short shorts and cropped top, and covered in some kind of candy necklace powder. The empty elastic was still around her throat. Or maybe she wore that thing all the time. She had fake tattoos all over her arms and her hair was intense purple, matted and wild, and she melted into me when I put my arms around her and tried to lift her off the ­ground. Hey, you crazy kid, I said. How are you? She couldn't talk because she was crying too hard. How are you, Thebie? I asked again. How are things? I didn't have to ask her. I had a pretty good idea. I let her wrap herself around me and then I carried her over to a plastic airport chair, sat down with her sprawled in my lap, all arms and legs, like a baby giraffe, and let her cry. How's the songwriting going? I finally whispered in her ear. I really liked that line . . . take a verse, Mojo . . . you know? I said. She was always ­e-­mailing me her lyrics and cc'ing David Geffen on ­them. She frowned. She wiped the snot off her face with the back of her hand, then onto her shorts. I'm more into martial arts now, and ­yo-­yoing, she said. I need to get out of my ­head. Yeah, I said. Using your kung fu powers for ­good? Well, she said, I feel good when I flip ­people. Hey, I said, where's your ­brother? She told me he was outside waiting in the van because he didn't know how to work the parking and also he didn't actually have his driver's licence, only his learner's, he's fifteen, he's all jacked up on rebellion and whatever, he just wanted to wait in the van and listen to his ­music. We headed for the exit and kind of stumbled around, falling over each other. Thebes kept her arm wrapped around my waist and tried to help me with my bag. All I had was one large backpack. I didn't know how long I'd be staying but it didn't really matter anyway. I'd lost my boyfriend and didn't care about my job and there was no reason to go back to Paris. I didn't own anything besides books, and Marc could keep those if he wanted ­to. It was sunny and warm and the sky was a sharp, cartoony blue compared to the wet clay skies of Paris, and there was Logan sitting in their ­beat-­up van staring straight ahead at something, not us, music blasting from inside, like the van was a giant Marshall amp. Thebes ran up to the van and threw herself against the windshield. Logan snapped out of his rock 'n' roll reverie for a second and smiled. Then he got out of the van and walked, glided, over to me and gave me a big hug with one arm and asked me how it was ­going. All right, I said, how about ­you? Mmmm, he said. He ­shrugged. Hey, what's this? I asked him. I grabbed his arm and squeezed his ­bicep. Yeah, right, said ­Thebes. And, dude, your pants! I said. Did you steal them from Andre the Giant? I snapped the elastic band on his boxers. Logan opened the door to the van and threw my stuff ­in. How was Paris? he ­asked. What? I ­said. Oh, Paris? Yeah, he said. How was ­it? Thebes turned down the volume on the music. Then she told me I should drive instead of Logan. She said she'd been planning her funeral on the way ­there. I got dumped, I ­said. No way! said ­Logan. Well, yeah, I ­said. You can't get dumped in Paris, said Logan. Isn't it supposed to be all- By a guy or a girl? asked ­Thebes. A guy, I ­said. Logan stared hard at Thebes for a few seconds. He said you were gay, she ­said. No I didn't, said ­Logan. You totally did! said ­Thebes. Okay, Thebes, listen, said Logan. I didn't- Hey, I said. It's okay. It really doesn't matter. Really. But it was a ­guy. But you're not that old, said Thebes, right? You can still find someone if you look hard. How old are ­you? Twenty-­eight, I ­said. Okay, ­twenty-­eight, she said. She thought for a second. You have like two years, she said. Maybe you should dress up more, ­though. Logan ended up driving back to their house because I didn't know how to tell him not to and because he hadn't seemed interested in relinquishing control of the wheel anyway. Logan and Thebes yelled at each other all the way back, the music cranked the whole ­time. Thebes: Stay in your lane, moron! Logan: Don't lose your fucking shit, man! Thebes: I don't want to die, loser! Use two hands! Logan: Do NOT grab the steering wheel! Then Thebes went into this strange kind of commentary thing she does, quoting the imaginary people in her head. This time it was a funeral director, I think. She said: With an impact this severe there is not a hope of reconstructing this kid's face. She banged the back window with her ­fist. What was that? I asked ­her. The lid of my coffin slamming down, she said. Closed casket. I'll be unrecognizable ­anyway. It was great to see the kids again. They'd changed a bit, especially Logan. He was a young man now, not a child. More on his mind, maybe, but with less compulsion to share it. Thebes was more manic than the last time I'd seen her. I knew what that was about. It's hard not to get a little hysterical when you're trying desperately to keep somebody you love alive, especially when the person you're trying to save is ambivalent about being saved. Thebes reminded me of myself when I was her age, rushing home from school ahead of Min so I could create the right vibe, a mood of happiness and fun that would sustain her for another day, or so I thought. I'd mentally rehearse what I thought were amusing anecdotes to entertain her, make her laugh. I didn't know then that all my ridiculous efforts only brought her further down. Sometimes she would laugh or applaud ­half-­heartedly, but it was always with an expression that said, yeah, whatever, Hattie, nice try, but everything is ­bullshit. -- My birth triggered a seismic shift in my sister's life. The day I was born she put her dress on backwards and ran away towards a brighter future, or possibly towards a brighter past. Our parents found her in a tree next door. Had she been planning to jump? She's been doing that ever since, travelling in two opposite directions at once, towards infancy and death. I don't know exactly what it was about me. By all accounts before I existed Min was a normal little girl, normal enough. She could pick a direction and stick with it. Our family photo albums are filled, halfway, with shots of Min laughing and smiling and enjoying life. And then, suddenly, I'm in the picture and Min's joy evaporates. I've spent hours staring at those photos trying to understand my sister. Even in the ones in which I don't appear it's easy to see by Min's expression that I am just beyond the lens, somewhere nearby. Min's had good days, some inexplicable breaks from the madness, periods of time where she functions beautifully and life is as smooth as glass, almost. The thing I remember most clearly about Cherkis, Thebes's and Logan's dad, is how nuts he was about Min and how excited he'd get when Min was on the ­up-­and-­up, taking care of business and acting normal. I liked that about him, but it also broke my heart because he had no idea of the amount of shit that was about to fly. Eventually, though, he did come to understand, and he did what I did, and what so many others in her life have ­done. He ­left. Min had a vague notion of where he'd gone. At first it was Tokyo, about as far away as you can get from here without being on your way back. He moved around the Pacific Rim, and then Europe for a while, South America, and then South Dakota. He'd call sometimes to see how the kids were doing, how Min was doing, if she wanted him to come back. No, she didn't, she said, every time. And if he tried to take the kids she'd kill herself for real. We didn't know whether this was a bluff or not, but nobody wanted to challenge it. They were all she had, she told him. Cherkis wasn't the type of guy to hire a lawyer and fight for custody. He told Min he'd wait until the kids were old enough to decide for themselves and take things from there. He didn't want to rock Min's boat. He didn't want anybody getting ­hurt. I moved to Paris, fled Min's dark planet for the City of Lights. I didn't want to leave her and the kids but the truth is she scared me and I thought she might be better off without me, too. Especially if I was the embodiment of her particular anguish. It had been hard to know whether to stay or go. It's impossible to move through the stages of grief when a person is both dead and alive, the way Min is. It's like she's living permanently in an airport terminal, moving from one departure lounge to another but never getting on a plane. Sometimes I tell myself that I'd do anything for Min. That I'd do whatever was necessary for her to be happy. Except that I'm not entirely sure what that would ­be. So the next best thing to being dead was being far away, at least as far as Paris. I had a boyfriend, Marc, and a job in a bookstore, and occasionally I'd go home, back to Manitoba, to Min and Thebes and Logan, for Christmas or the odd birthday, or to help with Min if she was in a really bad patch, but of course that was complicated because I never knew whether I should be there or ­not. I wanted to be an artist, in Paris, or a psychiatrist. Sometimes I'd haul a giant pad of sketch paper and some charcoal pencils to the square in front of the Louvre or wherever the tourists were and I'd offer to sketch them for free. I didn't feel right about charging anybody, because I wasn't really doing a good job. In every sketch, it didn't matter if I was drawing the face of a man or a woman or a kid, I'd include a detail from Min's face, from what I could remember at that precise moment. Sometimes it was the shape of her eyebrows, or her wide lips, or a constellation of tiny freckles, or even just a shadow beneath the cheekbone. The people I sketched were always slightly confused and disappointed when I showed them my work, I could tell, but most of them were kind, especially because I didn't expect any ­payment. Our father died in a drowning accident in Acapulco when Min and I were kids. He drowned trying to save us. We'd been racing and had swum out farther than we should have and Min had started panicking, screaming for help. The current was strong and we couldn't get back to the shore no matter how hard we pushed against the water. I remember yelling at Min to move sideways and to let go of me. After that, my memory of events is blurry. I have a feeling that Min was pushing me down, under water. I think that I remember her hand on my head, or on my shoulder, but maybe I'm wrong. Our mother told us that Dad had heard our screams and had swum out to get us, but that he too had got caught in the undertow and disappeared. They said it was a riptide. Other people on the beach eventually grabbed a boat from somewhere and rescued us, but by then Dad was gone. Min was fifteen and I was nine. They left us lying in the sun on the beach, crying and vomiting up salt water, while they searched for ­him. Excerpted from The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.