A Complicated Kindness: Chapter One 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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.”