Life, Dangling: A Review of Miriam Toews’s All My Puny Sorrows
Miriam Toews gives herself unreservedly to the reader. In 2005, she confronted the death of her father in Swing Low: A Life, a memoir rendered beautifully in her father’s voice. Mining personal tragedy once again for All My Puny Sorrows, Toews has written an introspective book on suicide, longing, and the tackling of difficult, existential questions. More than a novel, she has composed a glowing and compassionate elegy to the dead: the lost loved ones, the vanished childhood, its victories, and the resilience that is so often tested when the pitfalls of adulthood open beneath us. In her latest book, Toews holds the reader close, escorting him or her into difficult terrain that is unavoidably grim, yet punctuated by humour and welcomed moments of consolation.
Elfrieda “Elf” Von Riesen, a world-renowned pianist with a doting husband, has every reason to be grateful for her life, yet she is determined to end it. Her sister, Yolandi, or Yoli for short, is determined to keep her alive, though her own life is in disarray—two children by two different partners, the inability to be selective with men, and the daunting prospect of completing a novel which, by all accounts, hinges upon a nonsensical premise. Elf’s most recent suicide attempt comes just three weeks before the launch of her international tour, drawing Yoli forebodingly to her bedside. What follows is a series of Socratic dialogues between the two: one arguing in favour of life, and the other for dignity in death.“Toews is able to examine the search for, and the ultimate inability to find, existential meaning without descending into the grand platitudes”Given their opposing viewpoints, the sisters are constructed from the outset as “enemies who love each other,” a relationship anchored in Elf and Yoli’s childhood. For this, Toews doesn’t venture far from territory covered in her other novels, revisiting the complexities of a Mennonite upbringing under the intense scrutiny of the local elders. Yoli idealizes her older sister, who spent her teenaged rebellion “paint[ing] her symbol on various natural landmarks around [their] town,” and denouncing their pastor’s attempt to sabotage her opportunity to study abroad:
When the pastor and his old guys from our church came to our house to tell our parents they shouldn’t let Elf go away to study because she’d get big ideas … she played Rachmaninoff in the other room. It was like the more pressure they applied to my dad, the deeper she screamed. Well, screamed with the piano. She drove them away with her brilliance and her rage.One of Toews’s gifts is the ability to layer her characters with complexity, shaping and then deliberately undermining her characterizations. The novel vacillates between childhood memory—a refuge for the defiant and independent older sister—and the present day wraith confined to a hospital bed; the carefree woman who once jokingly told Yoli, “Relax. I love that you have semen in your ear,” and the stoic woman who consumes a bottle of bleach, irrevocably damaging her vocal cords. Toews reinforces the importance of the voice and the foreboding nature of silence in the novel, just as she does in Swing Low when she refers to her father as:
[a] respected teacher, known especially for his kindness, exuberance, and booming voice, and at home my mother and my sister and I had everything we could possibly want or need. There was only one thing we missed, and that was hearing him speak. I have often wondered what he would have said about himself, if he had spoken … His whole world, it seemed, was in the classroom and when there, he gave it his all … Had we known then what we know now, we would have understood that the end of his teaching career would, essentially, mean the end of Mel.Similarly, in All My Puny Sorrows, Yoli explains that her sister used to “stop talking for long periods like [her] father,” despite her belief that “people like to talk about their pain and loneliness.” Elf is, therefore, fortunate to have her piano, an instrument described as “the perfection of the human voice.” The reader understands that Elf’s ability to speak, emote, or express is inseparable from her ability to cope with the world around her and, as evidence builds to confirm that self-expression is a measurement of mental health, it becomes clear that “when [Elf] feels like she can’t play anymore then her life is over.” To capture the magnitude of this despair, Toews gives us one of her most gleaming metaphors: Elf worries “she has a glass piano inside her. She’s terrified that it will break,” an image which forces the reader to examine the quality of a life rendered inexpressible or incomprehensible, when all “mantras inevitably dissolve into meaninglessness and then begin to terrify her.” Toews is able to examine the search for, and the ultimate inability to find, existential meaning without descending into the grand platitudes and verbose philosophizing which so often plague less seasoned writers. She is successful, in part, because she gives the narrative to Yoli, an outsider looking in on mental illness who, alongside the reader, must slowly come to terms with the lack of cosmic order in the world around her. It is not Elf’s, but Yoli’s pursuit for a reason to live which propels the story forward, a search made complicated when her elder sister, whom she once idealized for her indomitability, is irreversibly demystified:
I wanted [Elf] to stop smashing her head against ceramic tiles and come to the dinner table. I wanted to see her weird eyes flash happiness while she told hilarious stories … I wanted my younger cousins to stare at her unabashedly with great admiration and envy, and for Elf then to put her arm around my shoulder. I wanted her to be her intoxicating, razor-sharp self, and I wanted to sit next to her and feel the heat she radiated, the energy of a fearless leader, a girl who moved easily in the world, my older sister.Yoli voices what so many of us realize as we enter adulthood: our protectors and the systems designed to protect us provide only the impression of order; life dangling by a hair. Her persistence to keep Elf alive demonstrates an attachment, not only to her sister, but the childhood belief that an accomplished life is absolute, instead of a “temporary detour from [the] innate longing for release and oblivion.” By rebelling against this belief system, Elf forces her sister to reflect on her own disappointments and, consequently, the absence of meaning in adulthood. As a result, Toews succeeds in universalizing life-fatigue, surreptitiously problematizing Yoli’s original aversion to suicide:
All I could think of was my younger self, the person I was before I’d become all of these other selves: a soon-to-be divorced woman … a grotesquely undiscerning lover … a sister who couldn’t say the right things to save a life and thereby was flipping over to becoming homicidal … I felt I was dying from rage and that I felt guilty about everything and that when I was a kid I woke up every morning singing, that I couldn’t wait to leap out of bed and rush out of the house into the magical kingdom that was my world … that there was no freer soul in the world than me at age nine, and that now I woke up every morning reminding myself that control is an illusion, taking deep breaths and counting to ten trying to ward off panic attacks and hoping that my own hands hadn’t managed to strangle me while I slept.Toews forces the reader to consider that we, too, “have secret killers lurking within us,” thereby normalizing nihilistic thoughts and impulses as by-products of the human experience. In defence of those who complete suicide—commit implies a criminal act which the novel attempts to refute—Toews rhetorically asks us to reflect on our own disillusionment, or, as Yoli describes it, “the days constantly coming around, over and over, the sun rises, birds begin to sing, there is a moment of possibility, of excruciating hope, and then it’s over, things darken, [and] the day is simply another tease.” Even so, Toews does not provide pat answers to her rhetorical questions, and it’s to her credit that Yoli is conflicted throughout the novel about helping her sister take her own life—an unenviable decision—with the knowledge that whichever choice she makes, the outcome will be unbearably tragic. One of the most poignant scenes in the novel has Yoli visiting the nurses’ desk, begging for reassurance that her sister will not be released in her absence:
I’m asking you please don’t believe her if she tells you she’s fine because she’ll be very convincing and you’ll think okay, let’s free up a bed, let’s let this one go, but I’m asking you to please not do that … The thing is, she wants to die and if you let her go I’m afraid she’ll kill herself even if she tells you in a very convincing way that she won’t kill herself.She places subsequent telephone calls to the nursing staff throughout the novel, “relentlessly at all hours of the day and night. She’s still there? She’s here. She’s there? She’s here. You won’t let her go? We won’t let her go.” This repetition is heartbreaking, because Yoli and the reader foresee yet another failed system, life dangling. The hospital will release her, and it’s our anticipation of this penultimate moment that is almost too difficult to bear.
“an author who refuses to point a finger accusingly at life or death, but ponders the insurmountable question of why we choose one over the other”Were this sense of futility the ongoing tone of the novel—it is a heavy read to be sure—it would be a lovely, if not despairing book, yet Toews elevates the experience with her trademark humour, buoying the narrative at its bleakest moments. It is no coincidence that most, if not all, of the comic resonances in the novel are found primarily in expressions of childish or adolescent optimism. Yoli recollects insinuating herself into the nativity pageant as a young girl, despite the fact that “Jesus doesn’t have a pushy aunt in this thing.” The presence of Yoli’s children in the novel, via text or telephone, uplift the story, even as Yoli wonders if:
Nora had poisoned Will and dragged his body into a closet and was having unprotected sex all over the house with her fifteen-year-old Swedish dancer boyfriend and she didn’t have the time or the inclination to talk to her sad old disapproving mother in the midst of it all.Although the book focuses primarily on what becomes of us once our childhoods reach their end, Toews asserts the importance of celebrating the hopefulness of youth—a time of limitless possibilities without the “weariness of life,” as Elf refers to it. Yoli describes a photograph of her recently deceased aunt, “hanging out her dad’s Oldsmobile when she was seventeen and waving goodbye, a giant grin on her face. See ya later, pioneers! I’m going to the big city!” The significance of this photograph is echoed at the end of the novel when Yoli visits her son and his girlfriend in New York City:
Will carried Zoe on his back and zoomed around the sidewalk and she laughed and bounced up and down and lost one of her flip-flops so we had to go back and retrace our steps in the dark which I suppose is the meaning of life.Their vitality, though fleeting, allows Yoli to find some semblance of meaning in the world around her: one must sometimes look back to, and for, the things that brought them joy, yet the presence of children provide opportunities, still, to live vicariously forward. Toews achieves with this novel what so few are able to do: she fearlessly “organizes her sadness through writing” to generate a wealth of insight, and provide consolation to, and kinship with, those of us who share her experience. Rarely does one sit with a novel and feel the presence of the author so acutely—an author who refuses to point a finger accusingly at life or death, but ponders the insurmountable question of why we choose one over the other, and provides a complex, if not resolute, defense in support of either choice. There is no judgment or blame in All My Puny Sorrows—only a love letter to sisterhood, and a heartfelt goodbye.
