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
When Nomi and Ray return home, they find a bullet hole in the house’s picture window. A policeman comes to survey the scene and says that kids have been messing around with BB guns lately. When things like this happened, Ray becomes energetic and almost decisive. He’s cheerful even while stepping on broken glass in the living room and even cleans up the house a little. When Nomi makes him a TV dinner he compliments her on her cooking. Nomi feels like he’s pretending to be “an idiot dad” and she’s just acting like a “rebellious teenager,” when really they’re “two mental patients just getting through another day.” She decides to go out.
This is a serious incident, yet Nomi and Ray seem unfazed, and no one makes plans to fix the window. The increasing physical disarray of the house reflects the increasing oddness in both Nomi and Ray’s behavior, and their inability to truly confront the absence of the rest of the family. This is especially apparent when Nomi says the incident makes her realize that her attempt to take over the housework is largely a pose, rather than a reflection of her actual character.
Themes
Nomi remembers that after Tash left, she started having nightmares about her sister burning in hell. When she woke up, she would find Trudie reading in the living room and ask if Tash was going to hell; Trudie would give vague responses like, “it won’t come to that, I’m sure.” When Nomi demanded the truth, Trudie said she didn’t know. Trudie quit her library job and started taking care of old Mrs. Klippenstein, who had sores on her leg that needed daily treatment. Nomi often accompanied her, and listened to Mrs. Klippenstein’s tales of her childhood in Russia and her marriage to a man who was eventually excommunicated. Trudie started spending a lot of time at Mrs. Klippenstein’s house.
Trudie’s inability to firmly assure Nomi that Tash isn’t going to Hell shows that she’s uncertain about this herself; even though she sees the flaws in her religion and encourages Tash to leave, she’s unable to disown it completely. Like Nomi, Trudie takes an interest in people like Mrs. Klippenstein, who live on the margins of the community. Nomi’s interest in the way people function after a family member’s excommunication foreshadows her own family’s possible expulsion from the community.
Themes
The Mouth often came to Nomi’s house to pray with her parents. Both he and Nomi were shocked to find out that Tash had become an atheist, but it turned out Trudie had known for months, even before Tash left, and didn’t care. Nomi blamed Tash’s library card.
That Nomi, as a child, thinks more similarly to The Mouth than to Trudie emphasizes the extent of her religious transformation over the course of the novel. It’s clear that her critical view of the Mennonite church has been a gradual transition, likely spurred on by Tash’s own atheism.
Themes
In the present day, Travis tells Nomi that he’s planning to move to Montreal. He says that she can come with him, find a cheap flat, and work as a life drawing model. Nomi says that she refuses to go because he used the word “flat,” and stalks back to her house, where Ray is sitting in front of the bullet-shattered window working on a watercolor painting. She goes inside and takes some of Tash’s Valium.
Nomi’s immediate recognition of Travis’s pretensions is funny and endearing, but underneath that, it seems like she’s mad that Travis has asked her to accompany him as an afterthought. Although Nomi can’t articulate it yet, she wants to leave town on her own terms, not as an accessory to someone else’s plan.
Themes
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Inside, Nomi sees that the dining-room table is gone. Ray explains that he has sold it, along with the freezer, in which he found the frozen body of Tash’s old cat, Blackula. It died in the winter, and Tash left home before she could bury him in the spring. Ray digs a grave for the cat, and Nomi tries to make a cross, although she’s too high on Valium do so well. Finally she gives up and watches Ray work. She enjoys being outside in the grass under the darkening sky, listening as her father makes corny jokes and smelling stubble fires from far away.
Ray has now sold two essential pieces of furniture. Making the house uninhabitable reflects his feelings of transformative loss over his wife’s departure. Yet, even though neither Ray nor Nomi want to move on from their former family life, Nomi’s lyrical description of the beautiful twilight as Ray buries the cat shows that they are still capable of enjoying life and forging new memories together.
Themes
After Ray finishes the grave, he leaves Nomi lying outside. After a while, she goes inside, puts on a record, and decides to razor her bangs, because Travis doesn’t like her hair that way. Then she puts on Tash’s sweatshirt and walks down to Main Street. She imagines Tash complimenting her hair and asking why she’s stolen her sweatshirt. In her mind, Tash says that she split up with Ian long ago and asks why Nomi is out here all alone if she has a boyfriend. Nomi walks home. As she’s sitting in the garage smoking a cigarette, a corner of the garage roof unexpectedly collapses.
Nomi’s fantasy of Tash dumping her boyfriend implies that Nomi herself is toying the with idea of leaving Travis behind. The fact that she has to imagine herself following her sister’s example shows how much she misses Tash and is desperate for guidance. It’s telling that her feelings of loneliness and evocation of her sister coincide with the roof’s collapse—another landmark of the physical disintegration that reflects the family’s breakdown.
Themes
