Women Talking becomes radical act
There’s no sleight of hand in the title of Miriam Toews’ new novel: Women Talking is what happens for almost its entirety. Talking being something women are said to do (and for which they are equally praised and disparaged), that might sound a tad mundane. Rather than play to stereotype, however, this particular confab constitutes a radical act.
The novel is based on events that took place over a decade ago in Bolivia’s Manitoba Colony of Mennonites. Colony women and girls were rendered unconscious with veterinary spray then raped by colony men, some of whom were their relatives. Victims were either blamed or accused of having wild imaginations. A secular Mennonite herself, Toews, the author most recently of All My Puny Sorrows, brings an insider’s knowledge to what she calls “a reaction through fiction to these true-life events.”
Women Talking is set in 2009, in the immediate aftermath of the rapes. With the perpetrators jailed in the city and the other colony men setting off to sell livestock for their bail, eight women from three generations of two families clandestinely meet in a hayloft to debate their options: do nothing, stay and fight, or leave. To read this intelligent, slow-burner of a novel, with its indelible characters and finely calibrated emotionality, is to realize how rarely women are shown debating anything except relationships. The trope of female hysteria versus male rationality is subverted: here, logic is the prime tool the women can wield against the men’s animal urges.
The arguing is at times orderly, at times circular and tetchy. Leaving, the women know, would catastrophically undermine the Mennonite experiment. At times it has a Beckettian, theatre-of-the-absurd quality, the women having been told that if they don’t forgive the men, they themselves will be denied entry into heaven.
The novel presents as a transcription of the meeting by a trusted colony man, August Epp, who also serves as narrator. Having once been excommunicated from the colony, Epp has experience of the outside world. Unlike the women, he’s literate and speaks English (the women communicate in low German). Counterintuitive as it sounds to use a male intermediary in a book called Women Talking, as a fictional strategy it’s brilliant, for reasons that become apparent.
In the same way science fiction can bring our earthly conflicts into sharper relief, the obscure specificity of its setting makes this novel’s relevance to the present moment (Cosby, #MeToo, Catholic abuse) more profound. Mercifully leavened with Toews’ trademark wit, it’s her best, most ambitious novel to date.