Fight Night

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-4

Part 1, Chapters 5-8

Part 2, Chapters 9-12

Part 2, Chapters 13-16

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

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Part 1, Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1: “Home”

Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary

Mom leaves Swiv a note that apologizes for not being a better mother. Swiv becomes anxious, thinking that this means Mom is contemplating suicide. Grandma placates her before she leaves to spend the day playing cards with her friends. Alone, Swiv does not know what to do with herself.

Mom comes home from rehearsal happy. She and Swiv take a walk and buy cookies. Mom talks and talks, telling Swiv not to worry about her and that she will keep fighting. They watch some people playing pickleball, and Mom mocks them for not playing real tennis. She is talking about old friends when they are interrupted by Mom’s director. After he leaves, Mom claims that he touched her inappropriately at rehearsal and hurls some insults at him. She also suggests that her acting career has been hampered by her age and now by her pregnancy, and she thinks the director is trying to blacklist her. Swiv asks where Dad is, and Mom says that she does not know.

Mom asks if Swiv wants to go back to school, but Swiv does not. She is still too determined to be “King of the Castle,” she tells Mom. Mom suggests that this might be a lonely position to take; she encourages Swiv to think in terms of teams, like the Toronto Raptors. On the walk home, Mom does some exercises to help strengthen her body before the baby. Swiv is embarrassed.

They arrive home to find Grandma playing Solitaire on the computer. She tells them a story about catching two of her older friends “in flagrante delicto” (74). While Swiv is somewhat confused, Mom and Grandma laugh. Their continued talk about sex—Mom’s first experience and Grandma’s last time—drives Swiv into the back bedroom, where she watches Netflix.

Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary

Mom reverts to her regular surly moods, and Swiv complains about picking up after her and Grandma. Grandma and Swiv have their “Editorial Meeting,” and Swiv asks if Grandma has finished her assignment: She is supposed to write a letter to Gord. Swiv cannot read her handwriting, so she has Grandma read the letter aloud while she takes notes. Grandma tells Gord that she will “be ready for you, little one” (79). Swiv asks her some questions and warns her away from coarse language; after all, Gord is just a baby. She also scolds Grandma for using her secret language, which nobody can understand. Their conversation is interrupted by the doorbell. Some former classmates of Swiv’s want to play.

The children play football for a while before coming back inside. One of the kids thinks that Grandma is dead, but Swiv knows she is just sleeping in her chair. She explains that they have to shout because Grandma does not hear very well.

Mom comes home from rehearsal, and Swiv hassles her for not finishing her assignment. Mom asks for an hour-long extension and writes her letter to Gord while Grandma and Swiv watch the Raptors play a disappointing game. Her letter talks about how she resisted writing because her sister, who died by suicide, wanted Mom to write her letters. Mom didn’t, and now she feels guilty. However, she also knows that stories have power, and Gord is part of her story. She unleashes a tirade against men who try to imprison people who leave when relationships get tough. She tells a disjointed story about people in Albania who get stranded and assaulted. The story turns into a first-person account of her being forcibly hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital before it trails off, unfinished.

Swiv slips the letter under Mom’s door after marking each page with a red “X.” She goes outside to throw clothespins into a bucket. She thinks that if she makes them all, Dad will come home. She misses. She then decides to confront her mother about the letter, writing in it that she wishes to discuss it. She changes her mind again, retrieving the letter and hiding it in the back of her closet.

Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary

Mom goes to get an ultrasound in the morning while Swiv and Grandma discuss anxiety, life, and death. Grandma wants to visit a salon because she has decided to travel to California to visit her nephews. She talks Swiv into helping her buy plane tickets; at Mom’s suggestion, Swiv will accompany her to Fresno. Swiv is worried that without her assistance, Grandma will have a heart attack. Many of the former refugees from the war have relocated to Fresno, so Grandma wants to visit them, as well.

Grandma talks to one of her friends, who tells her that another friend fell and died. Mom returns with the ultrasound, which still does not reveal Gord’s gender.

Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary

Swiv helps Grandma prepare for the trip to Fresno. On the bus, Mom accompanies the two for a few stops, embarrassing Swiv with her insistence that someone give up their seat for her as a pregnant woman. This leads to hostility among the other passengers on the bus, so Swiv insists that she and Grandma get off the bus early. It just happens to be at a stop that houses a strip club. Grandma finds this extraordinarily funny, while Swiv simply becomes more embarrassed.

Grandma gets a manicure and electrolysis at the salon before she and Swiv return home. Mom is making dinner, and she makes Grandma rest for a while beforehand. Jay Gatsby interrupts their dinner, and the women insist that they will never sell the house to him. Swiv worries about getting up early enough in the morning to fit Grandma with the compression socks she needs for the flight.Swiv helps Grandma prepare for the trip to Fresno. On the bus, Mom accompanies the two for a few stops, embarrassing Swiv with her insistence that someone give up their seat for her as a pregnant woman. This leads to hostility among the other passengers on the bus, so Swiv insists that she and Grandma get off the bus early. It just happens to be at a stop that houses a strip club. Grandma finds this extraordinarily funny, while Swiv simply becomes more embarrassed.

Part 1, Chapters 5-8 Analysis

Swiv’s anxiety is tied to her father’s absence, Mom’s emotional frailty, and Grandma’s physical decline. Mortality lingers everywhere around her, though she still fights to keep her family intact, deepening the theme of The Good Fight: Finding Joy. She sublimates some of her anxiety by attempting to parent her mother and grandmother; she represses it in other ways, like through her desire to be “King of the Castle”: “I told Mom about King of the Castle. I told her I was obsessed with being King of the Castle” (69). This is a large part of why Swiv had to leave school: She fights everyone. Her desire to take on the “king” role reveals a need to take control over a chaotic and unpredictable existence at home—the idiom “king of the castle” underscores the missing patriarch in the house and the void that Swiv must fill as a result. She is being asked, indirectly, to take on adult responsibilities and process emotions that she is too young to handle. She writes the book as a letter to her father; it is an appeal to enlist another responsible adult in her life. However, she slowly realizes that he is not coming home. The game she plays by throwing clothespins into a bucket, telling herself that Dad will come back if she makes them, reveals that Dad is gone for good: “I missed every shot” (93). Swiv needs to be the “king of the castle” because she cannot depend on any of the adults in her life.

Occasionally, Swiv breaks down and behaves like the child she is: “I hugged Grandma. I couldn’t let go” (82). She desires stability and security, though Grandma—as life affirming in her sparkle as she can be—is not an adequate candidate. Grandma needs too much care herself to give Swiv what she needs. Nonetheless, Swiv is resilient like Mom and Grandma, and her mimicry of adult talk within her narrative reveals this. Her reproduction of what the adults say both provides perspective and creates humor. The fact that Swiv is the one recording all the events within the novel also emphasizes her strength and authority. She will inherit the tragedy and the comedy of this family, adopting the traits in her matrilineal line.

Still, there are limits to her ability to transcribe events, as explored in The Limits of Language: Expressing the Unspeakable. For example, Swiv complains about Grandma’s foreign expressions: “It isn’t even a real language!” she shouts at Grandma (82). For all of Grandma’s insistence that her dialect—most likely a form of Plautdietsch, or low German with Dutch influence spoken in Mennonite communities—is an actual language, Swiv does not believe it. In addition, as Swiv understands, Mom does not always listen, and Grandma no longer hears well. Thus, incomprehensibility and misunderstanding proliferate within the household and Swiv’s narrative. In her house, “everyone [i]s yelling like usual” to be heard and hopefully understood (86).

This is also part of the family’s legacy, reinforcing the theme of Trauma and Triumph: Generational Inheritance. The suicides through which Mom and Grandma have had to survive, not to mention the trauma and repression of their experience growing up in Willit Braun’s community—one full of religious dogma fueled by misogyny—indicate that communication is not always possible. In the first instance, the depth of the loss is simply incomprehensible; in the second, it is suppressed by male authority. This potentially explains some of Swiv’s discomfort with anything sexual. When she demands that Grandma disembark the bus early, the family accidentally ends up in front of a strip club, which amuses Grandma: She “start[s] laughing her ass off again because [Swiv] of all people had wanted to get out at a strip club” (113). Swiv also defies gender norms; just as she is not quite a child or an adult, she is not quite identifiable as male or female. People mistake her gender frequently; for example, when Mom introduces her as her daughter to her former director, he says, “Oh! I thought you’d say son” (67). Swiv is a liminal figure, traveling between childhood and maturity, between genders and identities. She is wholly herself, indicating a chance at disrupting the family’s history of gender-based trauma.