Pam's Book 14: The Flying Troutmans

Miriam Toews' The Flying Troutmans is endearing, heart-wrenching, baffling, but mostly it's funny. The book jacket compares it to Little Miss Sunshine, which I guess it is, inasmuch as there is a van, a road trip, and a quirky family. But while Little Miss Sunshine was a blatant (but enjoyable) rip-off of the original National Lampoons Vacation movie, The Flying Troutmans is all its own.

Hattie, recently dumped for Buddha, is summoned from Paris by her ten-year-old niece Thebes. Hattie's psychologically disturbed sister Min has once again fallen apart, fifteen-year-old Logan is in trouble again at school, and Thebes is desperately trying to hold the family together. She even poses as her mother on the phone to her brother's principal. Hattie places Min in the local psych ward and takes the kids on a wild goose chase to find their father, Cherkis. Last anyone heard, Cherkis was in South Dakota. The Troutmans live in Canada.

While they travel, Thebes creates novelty checks (you know, the ridiculously big checks winners of television competitions receive) and other crafts, while Logan uses his knife to carve esoteric phrases into the dashboard. The tales of the road are interspersed with Hattie's memories of Min. We get a sketch of their family life growing up, the sisters' relationship, Min's relationship with her kids and their father, and the history of Min's various psychoses.

I think what I loved most about this book is how the characters are nutty and quirky, yet wholly believable and three-dimensional. Thebes has purple hair, is averse to personal hygiene, and talks like a gangsta. Logan is obsessed with basketball, music, his hoody, and his own personal angst. Both kids are in turns overly mature and emotionally stunted, which make sense in their situation. They fight like any siblings but love each other more than anything. Hattie obsesses over her ex-boyfriend and her sister and intermittently calls Paris, the hospital, Paris, the hospital, trying to sort out her life.

I feel like I'm reading a lot about dysfunctional families who somehow manage to love each other and grow throughout the book. But I guess everybody has a somewhat dysfunctional family, so 1) that's what people have to write about and 2) it's easy to connect to those stories. Most of us don't have (actually) psychotic sisters/mothers, but most of us do have siblings and all of us have mothers (whether their in our lives or not), and there's always that one person in the family who takes responsibility for the rest of us. That said, I'm sure this will not be the last book I blog about that centers around dysfunctional families in some way or another.