A BOY OF GOOD BREEDING
by Miriam Toews

Reviewed by Karen Bennett for the Fall 2005 issue of In House, a newsletter by and for staff of the Legislative Assembly of Ontario.

Miriam Toews (pronounced "Tahvz") was born in 1964 in the small Mennonite town of Steinbach, Manitoba. She left Steinbach at 18 and earned degrees in film studies and journalism before moving to Winnipeg with her family in 1991. When her youngest daughter started nursery school, Toews started writing books, and has won awards and critical acclaim for all of them.

Her novel Summer of My Amazing Luck was published in 1996, and A Boy of Good Breeding in 1998. Swing Low: A Life, a memoir of her manic-depressive father, came out in 2001. Toews's third novel, A Complicated Kindness (2004), is set in Manitoba, as were her previous books. Despite Kindness’s numerous awards and bestseller status, I was unable to finish reading it as I lost patience with the whiny boredom of the narrator and the oppressive Mennonite community she inhabited. I did better with Summer of My Amazing Luck, which I read next and found to be original, funny and thought-provoking. And when I got to A Boy of Good Breeding, I felt like I'd struck gold. I've never laughed so hard in my life. (Don't read this book in public if you want to be inconspicuous.)

A Boy of Good Breeding opens with Knute (pronounced "Noot," despite the insistence of Knute's mother that it's "Noot-uh") and her precocious four-year-old daughter moving from Winnipeg to Knute's hometown to look after her parents. But living in Algren and working for the eccentric mayor, Hosea Funk (odd names are a running gag in the novel), proves challenging and eye-opening. Hosea is trying to keep Algren's population at an even 1,500 (the number needed to graduate from "village" to "town" status) and so win a visit from the Prime Minister to "Canada's smallest town" on July 1st. (The novel's title is ironic, as Hosea is not a boy of good breeding, despite his belief, instilled in him by his single mother, that the Prime Minister was his father.)

Among Hosea's shifts to keep Algren's census numbers fixed is moving the municipal boundaries. A farmer greets Hosea's visits with the words, "So! Don't tell me, I'm out. Or am I in? ... What's it gonna be this time, Your Excellency?" It's a tribute to the author's skill with characters that I cared enough about Hosea to want to step inside the novel and shake some sense into him, especially when the town's lone doctor talks about leaving (and could be talked out of it) but Hosea can think of nothing but the census. And I cared when Knute's father, who was Hosea's best friend when they were boys and wanted to grow up to be a doctor, not a veterinarian, wastes away from depression.

In an interview, Toews once said, "Sometimes I am bugged by my own tendency to continuously go for the laughs, but I am trying to be genuinely funny even if it's in a dry, tragic way. I don't know if there is a Mennonite type of humour, but growing up with my dad, from day one I felt it was my job to make him laugh." Toews's father has passed on, but she is still doing her job. Her readers are the richer for it.

[Here's an interesting interview with Toews on Powells.com, done in early 2005.

[In the May 12, 2007 issue of Toronto's Globe and Mail was a story about a movie in which Toews was acting for the first time, playing—wait for it—a Mennonite. The director had cast her based on her author photo in A Complicated Kindness, which a friend had handed him to read. (The movie's plot was not based on Kindness.)]