Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Complicated Kindness, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Religion and Dogma
Family and Home
Community and Coming of Age
Narrative and Storytelling
Christian Salvation vs. Earthly Joy
Summary
Analysis
Nomi Nickel lives with her father, Ray, in a small bungalow near the highway. Ever since her mother, Trudie, and sister, Tash, left town, life has seemed to stand still; every day, she and Ray “move through our various activities until it’s time to go to bed.” Sometimes they watch the Northern Lights, a phenomenon Nomi has studied with her teacher Mr. Quiring. Mr. Quiring has also taught Nomi that all stories come to “a preordained ending that is quite out of the writer’s control.” Nomi isn’t sure about this, as it often to her that each story could have so many endings. However, it seems that there’s only one path ahead of her when she graduates high school in a few months: working in a local chicken slaughterhouse, alongside many other kids from her class.
At the start of the novel, the passivity with which Nomi and Ray move through their daily lives seems to reinforce Mr. Quiring’s beliefs about human lack of agency. At the same time, by starting her story abruptly and bombarding the reader with so much seemingly unconnected information, Nomi is implicitly challenging her teacher’s belief that stories must proceed according to a logical and “preordained” course. In addition, Nomi’s casual mention of the slaughterhouse communicates the lack of possibilities available to her in the community.
Themes
The chicken factory makes Nomi recall a long-ago memory of her mother, Trudie. Nomi is eight years old and standing with Trudie in a farmyard. A farmer, Mr. Enns, is efficiently slaughtering chickens and trying to teach his young son, Carson, to do the same, although the boy is clearly frightened and reluctant. When Carson finally manages to kill a chicken, Nomi’s mother compares the spray of blood to a Jackson Pollock painting and says, “who knew it could be so easy.” Nomi doesn’t know if she’s talking about killing a chicken, dying, or making art.
Here, Trudie references a secular artist, implicitly violating Mennonite prohibitions against contact with non-religious, modern culture. Nomi’s curiosity about the outside world prevents her from fitting in. Like Nomi, Trudie has a habit of finding beauty in the most seemingly disturbing of scenes.
Themes
Nomi explains that Trudie doesn’t live at home any more, having left soon after Tash ran away. Nomi and Ray have no idea where they are. Ray tells Nomi that the two of them are “having a good time and getting by,” but Nomi doesn’t feel this way. She thinks that things would be better if they could leave town, but they both feel they must wait for Trudie and Tash to return. Nomi adds that her period started the day after Trudie left.
From the beginning of the novel, Nomi recognizes that she must leave home in order to thrive. Yet her conception of family is so tied to her community that, for her, leaving means giving up on her hope of her loved ones reuniting.
Themes
Nomi’s town is oppressively silent, and it often feels that people are simply waiting to die. She feels that her Mennonite community is “the most embarrassing sub-sect of people to belong to if you’re a teenager.” Her ancestors fled persecution in European countries and settled in this remote region of Canada; ironically, her town is named East Village just like the New York neighborhood where she dreams of living. Mennonites turn their backs on everything enjoyable, from “temperate climates” to “having sex for fun,” and are supposed to spend their time contemplating the afterlife. Nomi feels that the founder of her sect, Menno Simons, must have had a troubled childhood.
A core tenet of Mennonite theology is turning away from worldly pleasures in order to secure salvation in the afterlife. Nomi shows how living by this principle can make life on Earth almost unbearable. Throughout the novel, adults will see Nomi as “troubled” for her failure to conform to Mennonite norms; yet she turns the tables, suggesting that Menno Simons himself must have been “troubled” to originate these principles in the first place.
Themes
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Nomi remembers that, although Trudie’s eyes are green, she listed them as hazel on her passport. Nomi wonders if Trudie has used her passport to travel to some exotic locale; she might be like the Mennonite missionaries who occasionally go to Africa and convince witch doctors to “smile for the camera while holding up a copy of the New Testament which means, praise the Lord, he’s been saved.” It’s easier to imagine Trudie deep-sea diving or visiting Paris.
Nomi’s sharp mockery of her community’s more absurd practices—like foisting their religion on people in other countries—provides much-needed comic relief in what is often a dark narrative. It also encourages readers to question the adults in the community, who refuse to see the humor in these situations.
Themes
Trudie has always loved to read mysteries and always aspired to visit the Holy Land, which intrigues her because of the many kinds of people living there; it’s unlike their own town, where everyone looks the same. Trudie would read books from the time Nomi and Tash departed for school to when they returned home in the afternoon. She always seemed surprised to see them, but in an hour she’d be “warm and untroubled” again as she made dinner. Nomi says it’s hard to paint a complete picture of Trudie because “there was something seething away inside of her, something fierce and unpredictable.” She’s a stark contrast to Ray, who is happy in the company of his two daughters and “fun-loving wife.”
Nomi paints a picture of Trudie as warm and loving, but also enigmatic and discontented. The sight of her reading on the couch is comforting to Nomi, but it’s also a sign that Trudie is chafing against her restricted life, and that the daily routine of domestic life isn’t enough to satisfy her. It’s important that while Trudie defies many ideas of what a “good” mother should be, Nomi never judges her; rather, she points out that Trudie’s unpredictability is one of the things her family loves best about her.
Themes
Despite reading about far-off places, Trudie spent much of her time in the church basement, where the Mennonite women have to sew clothing and care for children if they don’t want to go to hell. Expectations are especially high for Trudie because her brother, whom Nomi nicknames The Mouth, is the town minister; but she often neglected to help out, and once threw a romance novel into a charity box as a prank. Ray seems to love Trudie whether she’s breaking the rules or upholding them, but Nomi thinks both these personalities are just “poses” concealing a more complex character. The problem with her town is its intolerance for this kind of complexity: in East Village, people are either “very good or very bad.”
Trudie’s obligations as The Mouth’s sister will often clash with her desire to ensure her daughters’ well-being. Nomi astutely realizes that by emphasizing stark differences between good and evil, the community forces people to adopt “good” and “bad” personas that don’t represent their actual character. In contrast, Nomi’s narrative aims to capture her mother’s full complexity—and to represent her own.
Themes
