Journal of Mennonite Studies 25 (2007): 245-46.

Anita Horrocks, Almost Eden. Toronto: Tundra Books, 2006. Pp. 284. Softcover, $14.99.

Award-winning author Anita Horrocks’s fourth novel tells the touching story of twelve-year-old Elsie Redekop and her attempts to make sense of her Mennonite heritage—in terms of both her personal faith and the central presence of church community in her life—as she struggles to accept her parents as flawed and fragile human beings in the fictional town of Hopefield, Manitoba, in the summer of 1970. The middle child in a family of three daughters, Elsie blames herself for her mother’s mental breakdown and subsequent hospitalization. Elsie prays for understanding as a coping mechanism, and her prayers concern both her perceived responsibility for her mother’s mental health and the smaller, everyday troubles that seem insurmountable to her: sibling rivalry, competition between friends, boys she likes or doesn’t like. Her initial attempts to fix relationships and situations prove disastrous, in spite of her good intentions, but as she gains a broader understanding of herself and of those around her, her perceptions and actions likewise evolve and mature.

The links between protagonist and author are difficult to miss, given that Horrocks was born in 1958 and was raised as a Mennonite

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in Southern Manitoba. But the text itself suggests further links to two specific but very different texts: Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, published in 1970 and concerned with a twelve-year-old girl’s crisis of faith and identity as the child of a Jewish father and a Christian mother; and Miriam Toews’s A Complicated Kindness, about jaded sixteen-year-old Nomi Nickel’s coming-of-age in the fictional Mennonite town of East Village, Manitoba, in the 1970s. Like Margaret and Nomi, Elsie has regular conversations with God that reveal the thoughts and anxieties she cannot voice to anybody else. Both Nomi’s friend in Kindness, moreover, and Elsie’s mother in Eden are hospitalized in mental institutions named Eden. And much in the way that it does in Kindness, riding a bicycle without holding onto the handlebars is a central symbol in Almost Eden of perseverance and the ability to balance the conflicting forces in one’s life.

It is not likely a coincidence that Horrocks’s and Toews’s texts are set in the same decade, in Mennonite towns modeled on real places in Manitoba roughly 130 km apart: the city of Steinbach has been identified as the source for Toews’s East Village and Horrocks’s Hopetown appears to be modeled on her hometown of Winkler, home of Eden Health Care Services, a faith-based organization devoted to mental health. It would be overly simplistic, though, to presume that Horrocks has simply borrowed a little too freely from such a well-known recent novel as Toews’s (which did, after all, win the Governor General’s Award for fiction in 2004 and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize). Instead, given that Elsie’s perspective on her environment is so radically different from Nomi’s Almost Eden offers an alternative to the depiction of Mennonite communities that’s currently popular in Canadian literature. And so, while Nomi experiments with drugs, alcohol, and sex as she daydreams of befriending Lou Reed in East Village, New York, Elsie ultimately embraces her community and renegotiates a personal relationship with God. Moreover, in a subplot involving a sexual predator who targets children, the community in Horrocks’ novel rallies together to ensure the continued safety of every young person who might be at risk. Such changes, no doubt, have something to do with the requirements of texts for middle readers, but both the parallels to Kindness and the departures from Kindness remind readers that Nomi Nickel’s is not the only perspective available on growing up as a Mennonite-Canadian. By offering Elsie as an alternative, Almost Eden reveals the complex relationship between representation and public perception; together, the two novels make for an interesting and complicated likeness.

[ © 2007 Benjamin Lefebvre ]