In A Complicated Kindness, teenager Nomi Nickel relates the complex tale of her family’s departure from the Mennonite community. Interspersing present action and past memory, Nomi creates a circular narrative that prioritizes memory and emotion over facts and chronology. This style clashes with her teacher Mr. Quiring’s insistence that she write linear and well-organized reports and, more broadly, that she live in unquestioning devotion to the Mennonite Church and its leaders. In light of these demands, Nomi’s narrative style is not just an aesthetic choice; rather, is it is an attempt to create a space for nuance and ambiguity within a society that practices a strict and reductive ideology.
With its rigid ideas of right and wrong, Nomi’s Mennonite community values linear, clear-cut narratives that Nomi often finds reductive or meaningless. In one humorous incident, Nomi sarcastically describes a church handout detailing Satan’s fall in chart form; by collapsing a complex Biblical tale into a series of bullet points, the chart has rendered the narrative trite and meaningless. More broadly, this tendency surfaces in Nomi’s constant quarrels with her English teacher, Mr. Quiring. Mr. Quiring only values stories that include “a triggering point, a climax, and a resolution,” and he constantly finds fault with Nomi because her work flouts these stylistic conventions. For him, rejection of these narrative rules amounts to a defiance of Mennonite norms.
Indeed, the preference for cut-and-dried narratives extends beyond the classroom to important Mennonite rites like excommunication, the ultimate punishment for sinful behavior. Once church leaders excommunicate someone, the entire community must “shun” them, including their own family. Practices like these place narrative simplicity—in this case, declaring a specific person good or bad—over moral complexity and family relationships.
However, Nomi’s technique for telling her own story is far from linear. Rather than telling a single coherent story, Nomi relates a series of seemingly detached events. Constantly oscillating between the present day and childhood memories, she creates a confused sense of chronology, presenting the reader with a blurry impression of her life rather than a linear description. Notably, she also withholds important information from the reader. Even though Nomi’s mother, Trudie, left the family years ago, the reader only discovers at the end of the novel that she was excommunicated and forced to leave, rather than leaving of her own volition. These techniques work to create a holistic vision of Nomi’s thoughts and feelings, implicitly pointing out that the formats espoused by Mr. Quiring and the church don’t capture the world’s complexity.
But Nomi’s choices in telling her story are not just aesthetic; they also represent an attempt to reclaim her family’s narrative from the dominant social forces around her. At the end of the novel, Nomi reveals her discovery that prior to her excommunication, Trudie had an affair with Mr. Quiring, who then blackmailed her by threatening to portray her as sexually loose and demented to the town. He attempts to control her by presenting a narrative of her life that is reductive and inauthentic, and this attempt ultimately leads to her disappearance from Nomi’s life.
In contrast, Nomi’s narrative structure redeems her mother. By the time her transgression is revealed, the reader has already learned about her many positive attributes and family circumstances, and is thus able to understand her actions in the context of her difficult life. In the novel’s last pages Nomi addresses Mr. Quiring directly, saying sarcastically: “You gave my family an end.” In fact, she’s rejecting his and her community’s decision that her family must dissolve because of her mother’s actions. Rather, she has developed a mode of storytelling that accepts and even embraces moral fallibility within human relationships.
To tell her life story, Nomi creates a diffuse, circular narrative that contrasts with her society’s emphasis on circular and often reductive stories. Ultimately, this technique of portraying her life—and in particular, her mother’s actions—helps Nomi reclaim her family’s story from a community that devalues and condemns it.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Narrative and Storytelling ThemeTracker
Narrative and Storytelling Quotes in A Complicated Kindness
Mr. Quiring has told me that essays and stories generally come, organically, to a preordained ending that is quite out of the writer’s control. He says we will know when it happens, the ending. I don’t know about that I feel that there are so many to choose from.
There’s an invisible force that exerts a steady pressure on our words like a hand to an open, spurting wound. The town office building has a giant filing cabinet full of death certificates that say choked to death of his own anger or suffocated from unexpressed feelings of unhappiness.
I ended up saying stupid stuff like I just want to be myself, I just want to do things without wandering if they’re a sin or not. I want to be free. I want to know what it’s like to be forgiven by another human being (I was stoned, obviously) and not have to wait around all my life anxiously wondering if I’m an okay person or not and having to die to find out.
A tourist once came up to me and took a picture and said to her husband, now here’s a priceless juxtaposition of old and new. They debated the idea of giving me some money, then concluded: no.
I turned the paper over and studied a chart titled “Satan Cast Down.” There were different categories linked together with arrows and verses. Rapture, saved dead, unsaved dead, millennium, bottomless pit, lake of fire, beast and false prophet, new heaven, new earth. I tried to follow the complicated system of arrows and timelines.
I asked him why he was getting rid of the furniture and he said he liked empty spaces because you could imagine what might go in them someday.
We were quiet for a long, long time. Then I told him I wasn’t going anywhere. That I’d never leave him.
Heaven is always calm, with no wind. She said other stuff but I didn’t really understand it. I understood there was no wind in heaven. That’s partly why I love the wind that blows around in this town. It makes me feel like I’m in the world.
We drove to the pits and rinsed the purple gas off in the water which made it beautiful and we floated around in gassy rainbows for hours talking about stuff and lighting the gas with Travis’s lighter so it was like we were in hell. Rainbow pools of fire in the pits, the smell of smoking stubble, the hot wind, dying chickens, the night, my childhood.
And we counted cars with American plates—twenty-seven. On their way to watch The Mouth read Revelations by candlelight in the fake church while the people of the real town sat in a field of dirt cheering on collisions.
Truthfully, this story ends with me still sitting on the floor of my room wondering who I’ll become if I leave this town and remembering when I was little kid and loved to fall asleep in my bed […] listening to the voices of my sister and my mother talking and laughing in the kitchen and the sounds of my dad poking around in the yard, making things beautiful right outside my bedroom window.
