Travails with an aunt

The Flying Troutmans, by Miriam Toews

Suicidal single mothers, delinquent teenagers and unwashed children sound like the ingredients for a standard-issue misery memoir with an embossed, hand-scripted title and a toddler in tears on the cover. Fortunately, Miriam Toews has instead shaken them with wit, warmth and a firm pinch of absurdity, and produced a grittily sparkling cocktail of a novel.

Most popular

Rod Liddle

British Steel and the death of dim-witted globalisation

The Flying Troutmans takes a bleak premise, adds pitch-perfect, fully human characters and makes it, if not laugh-out-loud funny, at least difficult to read without a couple of sniggers per chapter.

Hattie Troutman has fled to Paris to escape the emotional masochism of proximity to her disturbed and chronically depressed sister, Min. But after three years of European self-indulgence, she boomerangs back to Canada when summoned by her 11-year-old niece, Thebes (Theodora). Once home, she discovers her sister is bedridden and refusing to eat; 15-year-old Logan is on the verge of being expelled, and his sister Thebes has developed a profound aversion to soap and water.

After installing Min in hospital, Hattie decides that the children’s father is the one person who can reasonably be expected to assist. This despite the fact that he was last heard of ten years previously, somewhere unspecified in the United States. But somehow Hattie’s decision to pack the children into a van and traverse North America looking for a man with whom they’ve had no contact in a decade seems, if not exactly rational, at least emotionally plausible.

Parentless herself, thrown from a life in which her greatest problem was her French boyfriend’s lack of commitment to total responsibility for two vulnerable children, Hattie is desperate both for an adult with whom to share the enormity of the situation, and to ensure that someone is forced to fight their corner besides her 28-year-old self.