Themes of a Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews

It can be said that struggles bring people together and, at the same time, break them apart. When two people realize their life situations are quite similar are controlled by fundamentalism, they tend to stay close to one another for comfort and understanding, even though they share nothing in interest. However one will eventually attempt a change, to try and manipulate their circumstances for the better or to leave. The other is inevitably left alone and desolate. Although a complicated kindness entwines many such consequences from social issues and other obstacles deep inside its storylines, it reveals its dominant theme in the conclusion: that love endures in the end. Love will make hardships tolerable, will bind people together in spirit if not in a physical sense, and will brighten the optimism in the heart.

Pain can be a deep scrape in the knee on the gravel, or a growing black rose at the base of the heart. In a sense, however, they differ by a lifetime; a wound eventually closes and smoothes out, whereas as time goes on, the depression tears the body from inside out, darkening the senses, draining the spirit. And through all that, the girl lives onwards, rarely thinking about the consequences of her divided family, about her failing grades, her abusive drug use, and even about herself.

Where did her mother go without any clothing or transportation out of town? Why did her sister, Tash, leave them? “I use drugs and imagination to block [those] questions,” the girl decides. Furthermore, she states, “I’m only mentioning these things because they weigh on me. Not because I let them control my life” ironically surfacing the evident pain the absence of part of her family is causing. She is strong. Nomi is strong. But she is so because there is love around her emanating from her father, from past memories of her whole