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Chapter Four
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in A Complicated Kindness, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Religion and Dogma
Family and Home
Community and Coming of Age
Narrative and Storytelling
Christian Salvation vs. Earthly Joy
Summary
Analysis
After supper, Nomi and Travis go for a drive and meet their friends at the pits, a drainage ditch and gathering place outside the town. For a while they sit in companionable silence but then Travis says he’s been thinking about “consciousness” and “fucking.” Nomi, a little taken aback since they’ve never had sex, responds that she’s been thinking about “getting a small horse I can ride but not be scared of.” Travis feels she is making fun of him and storms out of the car to buy weed from The Golden Comb, their local dealer.
While Travis makes frequent (if often incoherent) philosophical pronouncements, Nomi tends to downplay to the value of her own thoughts, as she does here. This displays a humility that Travis lacks, but also a lack of confidence in herself, which makes it easy for Travis to intimidate her and dictate her behavior.
Themes
Annoyed, Nomi gets out of the car and runs into Sheridan Klippenstein. Trudie used to care for his grandmother, old Mrs. Klippenstein. Nomi once wrote a short story about Mrs. Klippenstein’s house, only for her English teacher, Mr. Quiring, to correct some detail about the interior. Sheridan tells Nomi that his father has left home to play in a cover band, and Nomi commiserates with him and asks what he’s been doing. Sheridan says he’s dropped out of school and works at a public park near a lake where his mother drowned herself years ago. Nomi remembers Sheridan’s mother fondly; she wore highlights in her hair and always let Nomi draw on her basement walls.
Like Nomi’s life, Sheridan’s has also been upended by his parents’ inability to conform to communal norms. In a sense, his situation shows what could happen to her, and is justifiably anxiety-inducing. Mr. Quiring’s familiarity with the inside of Mrs. Klippenstein’s house seems like a small-town quirk, but will take on greater significance later in the novel.
Themes
Nomi and Sheridan reminisce about playing together as children, yelling goodbye at each other in lots of different languages. A few years later, Sheridan’s father was excommunicated for an unknown crime but chose to live in the town like a ghost even though everyone, including his family, was obligated to shun him. Shortly afterward, Sheridan’s mother went insane and killed herself; Trudie attributed this to the pain of having to pretend her husband is dead. In the present day, Nomi and Sheridan smoke a cigarette together, and Nomi suggests that they meet at the pits every five years to catch up.
This is the first mention of excommunication, a practice in which transgressive church members are cast out of the community, and even their family members are obliged to “shun” them. Nomi presents this not as neutral religious practice, but in terms of its cruel, potentially disastrous human cost.
Themes
