The Flying Troutmans, Miriam Toews

With my internet block on, I ended up getting distracted by real books and finished The Flying Troutmans by Miriam Toews last night.  I've read one of her other books, which deals with similar issues: very messed up families.  Her other book, A Complicated Kindness, is about a repressed mennonite family and this one is about a family with a mentally unstable mother.  I suspect these stories come from personal experience.  What's great about her books is that they have melodramatic, cliched storylines but the drama is mostly subtext.  On the surface we get (the fabric of everyday life) ordinary conversations with characters who are lively or moody, funny, and very real, rarely do they get melodramatic: the story is serious but the tone isn't.  People are fundamentally kind, though unhappy, although things get better and worse the characters prove themselves capable of enduring, so it has an optimistic message.  I think this aligns with my own world view.  Cynicism is fun - and funny - to indulge in but I don't actually have that little faith in humanity, while sentimental stories seem to lack self-awareness or self-respect; and although the story deals with difficult issues it avoids either.  I think she's an impressive conversation writer.