Fighting is often associated with masculine impulses of aggression and destruction. The term inspires imagery of warfare, bloodshed and brutality — outcomes that are necessary to establish dominance. Despite these implications, Miriam Toews’ Fight Night is interested in the violent act as it relates to healing, resistance, and reparative efforts, offering an invigorating approach that addresses what has long been missing from the conversation. The novel asks: how can women seek liberation and confront their oppressors while maintaining peace? Can we reimagine what it means to fight? Though the task of answering such questions is indeed daunting, Toews’ novel dares to do so in a manner that promises an abundance of possibilities for the future.

In her exploration of alternative frameworks of fighting, Toews introduces us to nine-year-old Swiv who navigates life in Toronto with her pregnant mother Mooshie, a stage and film actress, and her grandmother Elvira, a frail but vibrant matriarch. After repeatedly engaging in physical altercations at school, Swiv is suspended and instead studies under a makeshift curriculum populated with Montessori-style classes taught by her grandmother titled “Penmanship,” “Facts” and “How to Dig a Winter Grave.” Outside of her hands-on education, Swiv accompanies her grandmother on excursions, riding streetcars and buses across Toronto and flying to Fresno to see her nephews.

Aside from roughhousing during King of the Castle, the playground game that leads to Swiv’s suspension, the fights that play out across the novel are less physical and more concerned with the day-to-day struggle for survival. Her grandmother who once fought to escape the tyrannical rule of a religious leader now fights for her health with an extensive list of medications and against a land developer insistent on purchasing their family home. Swiv’s mother struggles to get along with the stage manager at her theatre company while grappling with a depressive disorder set off after the sudden departure of her husband. These difficult, ongoing fights are carried out in pursuit of life, freedom, love and self-determination – values sought by the family to recover after a history of loss.

To improve their odds of winning the novel’s ongoing fights, the women employ tactics of resistance from embracing one’s idiosyncrasies in public to interrogating institutional beliefs and directives. As much as these acts take part in the process of fighting, they’re also a source of joy. This is one of the novel’s many animating interventions: it would be convenient to appropriate traditional modes of fighting constructed by the establishment, but Toews warns against such structures and instead emphasizes celebration, pleasure, rowdiness. We see this when Swiv and her grandmother play with medication, run around knocking over display stands, and steal a wheelchair at the airport in order to access bathrooms in time. Their ability to find lightness is not a byproduct of their boisterous personalities but precisely what sustains their ability to fight. 

The convergence of play and strategy is most evidently and delightfully demonstrated through Elvira’s references to the Raptors. As a devoted supporter of the team, she cheers for the players while also dispensing valuable lessons about fighting that can be transferred from the basketball court to the lives of our protagonists. Explaining that teamwork is integral to success, she explains, “…the Raptors are so good because they’re collectively trying to win, not a single one of them just trying to break personal records or up his stats or whatever.” With this display of insight, Toews usefully prompts us to dive into the unexpected and whimsical in search of other truths so that we, too, might recognize exciting opportunities to make sense of the world – for instance, realizing that fighting can engender unity.

With cross-generational kinships among women, written documents as narrative devices, and autobiographical elements, Fight Night could easily share a title with Toews’ last novel Women Talking, which concerns a group of Mennonite women who discuss their fates after a series of sexual assaults. Despite the challenging subject matters at hand, both works attend to their characters with care so that obstacles of violence and suicide are met with displays of resilience, humour and optimism. When confronted with urgent matters, the women in Toews’ worlds insist on searching for answers that emphasize non-violence and refuse to perpetuate the oppression responsible for their circumstances.

Where Toews’ latest project departs, however, lies in the relationship with writing that each character nurtures. Rather than incorporating speech in the form of meeting minutes as in her previous novel, Fight Night is structured around the hypothetical letters to Swiv’s absent father and Gord, her soon-to-be sibling. Here, Toews grants her characters the luxury of time to deliberately select their words and develop their thoughts so they can eventually arrive at a place where storytelling sustains their survival. Given the emotional depth of the correspondences, then, it’s no surprise that Toews successfully imparts the potential of language to make a difference. Reading Toews’ words, we simultaneously witness writing’s ability to provide catharsis to the characters and receive the force of her words as an author ourselves, resulting in a reading experience that is equal parts introspective and electrifying.

Though our young protagonist’s narration style may deceive some readers into concluding the novel as unfocused or directionless, the lack of structure and restraint becomes a strength in moments when Swiv’s spirited curiosity shines through. Her unfiltered thoughts are as captivating as they are disarming, offering observations that are simultaneously entertaining and capable of interrogating that which appears obvious or natural. After spending enough time with Swiv’s openness and lack of preconceptions, a radical understanding of fighting emerges and eventually becomes a realistic possibility. What if fighting was motivated by the desire to love, to reclaim life and to feel? What if, as Elviria suggests, fighting could inspire peace? The novel forms no definitive conclusions, presenting us with the task of thinking through this potential, but does ultimately advance the case towards exploring alternatives in whatever form that may arrive for us. “Fighting means different things for different people. You’ll know for yourself what to fight.”