43 pages • 1 hour read
Miriam ToewsFight Night
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2021A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Home”
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary
Nine-year-old Swiv is writing a letter to her absent father. Her mother, or “Mom,” is pregnant—they call the child “Gord”—and uncomfortable. Now in her third trimester, she is prone to even greater emotional outbursts than usual. Swiv has been expelled from school, and her grandmother, Elvira, or “Grandma,” has come to stay with them. Swiv decides to write the letter to her father at the behest of the family therapist, whom they can no longer afford to see.
Grandma conducts unconventional lessons for Swiv, including “Editorial Meeting” and a math class that tracks mortality. She also sometimes speaks in her “secret language,” as Swiv calls it (5). The family is occasionally bothered by a man they call Jay Gatsby, who is trying to buy their house.
Grandma talks about all her friends and family who have died. According to Swiv, she gets phone calls nearly every day informing her of another death. She also despises the police and refuses to eat the healthy food that Mom leaves for her. Mom is often out of the house at rehearsals for a play, even though she will probably not perform due to her pregnancy.
Swiv searches for Grandma’s missing hearing aids, helps her bathe, and keeps track of her many prescription pills. Grandma does not care for doctors, even though she used to be a nurse. She often claims that doctors are responsible for the deaths of Grandpa and Momo, her daughter. Swiv observes that she often says this when she has been drinking rum. Grandma refuses to use the machine that helps her sleep, which leads Swiv to reprint a note that her mom left for her dad about sleeping: The two disagreed on how best to make the bed.
Grandma finally notices that Swiv is not going to school at all and finds out that she has been expelled for fighting. The kids at school have been teasing Swiv about her dad, saying that he is a communist who is being tortured somewhere. Grandma immediately dismisses such a notion. Grandma has the idea to write “REBEL STRONGHOLD” on their roof so that Jay Gatsby will see it. They decide to use Mom’s books to spell out the words. When Mom discovers what they have done, she does not explode into anger; instead, she quietly tells Swiv to return the books to the shelves.
Grandma and Swiv help Mom practice lines after dinner, and this reminds Grandma of an old story. When she was young, she approached the wall dividing West Berlin from East Berlin and undressed for the soldier standing guard in the East. Mom laughs and says that the soldier almost certainly remembers Grandma.
Part 1, Chapter 2 Summary
Swiv continues her letter. Mom throws a tantrum, tossing objects about and tearing apart a necklace that Dad gave her. Swiv asks if Mom has been talking to Dad, and she dodges the question. When Mom says that she is going to the Russian spa to relax, Grandma comments on escaping the Russians. She also talks about the Canadian village where she lived for 62 years; she describes it as oppressive, ruled by authoritarian types like Willit Braun, a religious leader. When she was young, her father protected her from Braun, and when she was grown, she protected her own family from him. Grandpa, she says, could not protect himself.
Swiv and Grandma go to meet the group of surviving friends from her village at a local pub. On the way there, Grandma needs to use the bathroom urgently because she is on diuretic medication. When they stop at a local office building, the security guard will not let her use their restroom. Swiv gets angry, and Grandma gets agitated. Swiv worries about Grandma’s heart, and they buy doughnuts at a nearby restaurant so that Grandma can use the bathroom there. Grandma tells Swiv not to get too worked up about these things, but Swiv understands the underlying directive that she must always fight against injustice. She feels like she is protecting Grandma.
They finally make it to the pub, and Grandma’s friends all talk about who has died recently. They talk about assisted dying and decide to say goodbye to each other that day in case they never see each other again. On the way home, Grandma farts in the streetcar, embarrassing Swiv. Grandma just laughs, telling Swiv that she used to blame her for the noise when she was a baby. Swiv decides that she must protect Gord in the future, too.
That evening, Jay Gatsby returns to the house, and Mom slams the door shut on him. The family watches basketball together as they eat dinner. Mom complains about the stage manager of her play; she thinks that the woman doesn’t like her because she forgets to give Mom her cues. Grandma tries to soothe her worries.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary
When Mom leaves for rehearsal the next morning, she reminds Swiv that the exterminator is coming. Grandma has seen a rat in the house, but the exterminator thinks that Grandma imagined it.
Mom returns home upset: The play might be canceled and its government funding cut because of its political messaging. Grandma commences Swiv’s lessons for the day, including “Poached Egg,” “Sudoku,” and “Boggle.” In “Math Class,” Grandma has Swiv cut up one of Mom’s books into equal numbers of pages; the books, when whole, are too heavy for her to hold when reading.
In “Ancient History” class, Grandma tells Swiv about her upbringing as one of 14 kids living in a house with coal for heat. Grandma talks about being the one to shovel the coal while the rest of the family slept. After her father died, her brothers sent her away to Omaha to live with a family as their maid. She says that her brothers claimed all the inheritance, leaving her and her sisters with nothing. She remembers how cold it was in Omaha, but an old woman passing her on the street said that it wasn’t that bad.
Later that day, after Grandma and Mom talk behind closed doors, Mom takes Swiv to the card shop. Mom tries to address the card at the counter, but the merchant asks her to make way for the other customers. She rants about capitalism as Swiv pulls her out of the store, telling the owner that Mom is pregnant.
While they are eating dinner, Grandma starts talking about how to have sex while pregnant, and Swiv is mortified. At Mom’s urging, Grandma then tells the story about how she once stole a car. She goes to retrieve an album with pictures of her ancestors. Some of the people in the pictures were dead when the pictures were taken. Photographs were considered disreputable at the time, but when someone died, the family often wanted a picture by which to remember them. Swiv looks at the picture of a young girl, very much alive, and she is amazed that her grandmother’s grandmother was once so young.
Part 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Swiv finds Grandma lying on the kitchen floor the next morning: She fell and did not want to wake the others to help her up. Swiv helps her up and walks with her the rest of the day. When Grandma needs a rest in her bedroom, Swiv watches television with her and asks about her mom. Grandma tells Swiv that Mom is struggling, both with the pregnancy and with her emotions. Now that Dad is gone, all the burden falls on Mom. Grandma tells Swiv that they do not know where Dad is.
Grandma tells Swiv that Mom worries about dying by suicide because Grandpa, her father, and her sister, Momo, all did. Grandma emphasizes that the important thing to remember is not these tragic events but that they are all here together right now. Grandma reads a passage about being alive and grateful to Swiv. When Mom returns from rehearsal, she and Grandma talk quietly in the other room.
Part 1, Chapters 1-4 Analysis
Written from a child’s point of view, the novel both illuminates and obscures the burden of inheritance and the meaning of family through the lens of Trauma and Triumph: Generational Inheritance. While Swiv is clearly precocious—her verbal mannerisms imitate the quick-witted women around her—she does not understand the significance of everything that is told to her. Thus, the family history is revealed only in bits and pieces, some of which are never fully explained. This becomes a thematic concern in and of itself: the inability of language to adequately express feeling or communicate clearly, as explored further in The Limits of Language: Expressing the Unspeakable. Some events, like suicide, are inexplicable and unimaginable, much less coherent subjects for conversation. They defy logic; they do not make sense. It seems fitting, then, that the narrator is a pre-adolescent child, on the cusp of understanding but still protected by innocence.
One issue that Swiv does understand is that her father’s absence impacts the entire family. In his absence, Mom grapples not only with her emotional health but also with her pregnancy. Grandma has come to help care for Mom and Swiv, but her age and infirmity prevent her from doing much. It falls on Swiv, a child, to fill in the gaps: “I’m the one who cleans everything!” she reminds the women (12). She also becomes the caretaker for Grandma, doling out her daily pills, picking up the ones she drops, and even bathing her. While Grandma drily notes that Mom “does the emotional work for the whole family, feeling everything ten times harder than is necessary so the rest of us can act normal” (7), Swiv shoulders the practical work. Everyone is so concerned about Mom that Swiv must navigate her own path, guided only by Grandma’s erratic lessons and her own scrappy energy. At the beginning of her letter to Dad, she understands, “[I]t takes way longer to put things back together than take them apart” (3). Although her observation comes in the context of a school project, it aptly describes the trajectory of this family unit: Grandma has had to put her life back together after the tragic deaths of her husband and daughter—Mom’s father and sister—and now she tries to keep Mom from falling apart. Swiv reaches out to Dad in the same spirit. However, language here is futile: Nobody knows where Dad has absconded to, so the letters cannot be sent.
Thus, the only alternative is to fight, as The Good Fight: Finding Joy explores. Swiv has been expelled from school for fighting, though the adults do not scold her for such actions. The unspoken fear is that without fighting, one loses—not just a home to Jay Gatsby or one’s dignity to Willit Braun but one’s very life. As Grandma recognizes in Swiv, “I think you have that, Swivchen,” by which she means the “ability to create light from within” (23). That fighting spirit, with its burning light, keeps Swiv, Grandma, and Mom afloat in turbulent times. As Grandma poignantly admits, Grandpa “couldn’t fight for himself” (31). He lost the battle, whereas she remains deeply mired in it. This creates a parallel between Grandma’s story and Mom’s, where women are left alone to carry through. This speaks to the book’s emphasis on matriarchal bonds and power, especially in the face of patriarchal oppression.
Grandma alternately struggles with and embraces her mortality. Not only has she already suffered losses within her own family, but she also endures near-daily calls with news of lost friends. Still, she rarely complains and laughs at her own feebleness. Swiv finds her singing when she falls in the kitchen: “Cool your jets! said Grandma. Nothing happened! Nuscht! I just fell” (57). She decides to celebrate life while she is living rather than mourn her inevitable death. As she and her friends determine at the pub, it’s best to say goodbye when one can, cheerfully and lovingly: “Let’s say goodbye now and get it over with! We’re friends, we love each other, we know it, we’ve had good times, and one day we’ll be dead” (35). Of course, her words are interpreted through Swiv’s narrative perspective, whose understanding of mortality has not yet been tested, but they undeniably convey a mischievous and undaunted spirit.
Finally, Swiv’s epistolary recounting of daily life with Grandma becomes part of the historical record. It is not merely a letter or a plea to her missing father; it is also—like the photos of the dead in Grandma’s album—proof of life, incontrovertible evidence that Grandma exists (and, by extension, Mom, Swiv, and those who were lost like Grandpa and Momo). Like many families with memories of war—Grandma’s stories suggest that she emigrated to Canada after World War II—physical evidence of existence speaks to survival rather than erasure, not just of individuals but whole families. Grandma still “uses an obituary of Auntie Momo as her bookmarker” (58), Swiv observes, another concrete symbol of memory and preservation.
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