Pop culture and the construction of ethnicity in Richard Van Camp's The Lesser Blessed and Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness

Abstract

For Larry and Nomi, the protagonists of Richard Van Camp’s the Lesser Blessed (1996) and Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness (2004), wrestling with teenage angst is complicated by the issue of ethnicity and the claims their respective communities put on them. If you think that becoming an adult is tough enough, try becoming an Indian or a Mennonite in contemporary Canada. That is, in substance, what the two narrators are asking us. But the way they are telling their story, the energy and the refreshing humour they put into it, are well worth our attention in a context where CanLit - the CanLit which receives national awards and international attention - is being queried by some for the plain boredom it inspires in them : “One could say,” Douglas Coupland writes, “that CanLit is the literary equivalent of representational landscape painting, with small forays into waterfowl depiction and still lifes. It is not a modern art form, nor does it want to be” (The New York Times 2006). Modernity, however, features prominently in the two novels I propose to study in parallel, insofar as the strategies they resort to point to a shared experience of ethnicity which transcends individual allegiances to a given community. My analysis will concentrate on the ubiquitous references to pop culture which index contemporaneity in the two works, interrogating the stereotypes of the quaint Mennonite and the romantic Indian, two figures safely sealed within the amber light of the past.