Welcome to the Neighbourhood by Clea Young

I grew up with a hazy awareness of the Welcome Wagon. Despite it being a business (founded in Memphis, Tennessee, Wikipedia tells me, just before the Great Depression), my childhood notion of WW centred on a cheerful troupe of housewives who showed up shortly after the moving truck pulled away. I imagined that these volunteers brought baked treats and casseroles and shared useful information; they welcomed neighbourhood newcomers by, well, being welcoming. 

I can no longer recall how I factored in “wagon,” but suppose now that I—who grew up to a soundtrack of Patsy Cline and Glen Campbell—pictured them in a country and western finery with ancestral roots in covered wagons. 

Squamish, BC author Clea Young follows Teardown with another impressive collection of stories. They relate in almost no way to my Welcome Wagon anecdote, though they overlap nominally at a neighbourliness where newbies are embraced with warm enthusiasm. As a kid, I loved the idea of it: of course, a neighbourhood should be friendly, with easygoing and familial relations with the houses next door and across the street. Welcome to the Neighbourhood is an ironic title, though. If any of Young’s characters did once believe that the phrase “Welcome to the neighbourhood” could be spoken wholly in earnest, that time has passed. Her characters are canny; they’re toughened by experience, wary, and a bit skeptical about humanity, whether near or far. 

In story after accomplished story, people really do not get along. They desire to and make efforts, but with frustratingly unsatisfactory results. Welcome is populated by complex and contradictory individuals; a couple of them, that’s volatility itself. Two married couples with their high-maintenance kids on a weekend getaway? Cue the fireworks and wait for the parade of wounded egos.

Young’s characters yearn for community, for untroubled friendships, for peace, love, and understanding (to quote Nick Lowe)—as though they too grew up with a notion of the Welcome Wagon and feel nostalgia for something they hold dear but cannot actually manifest in their everyday lives. 

The narrator of “Weekend Guest,” a self-described “neurotic mother of an only child,” is characteristic. She’s “as isolated as a homesteader” before she meets Holly. In downtown Vancouver she’s surrounded by stacks of neighbours but has “never attempted to make a true connection” and “learned a marriage had ended when a moving truck arrived.” After the friendship’s honeymoon phase, she’s parsing Holly’s texts for subtext; a disastrous two-family trip to the Sunshine Coast ends on a delightfully tart note, with the narrator’s abrupt return the city—semi-comforted by with her invisibility within crowds she pushes “through in transit stations, anonymous shoulders and limbs.”

Whether anatomizing geriatric eco-terrorism (“Shred”), teenage misdeeds (“Crows, Kittens, Mint Juleps”), parental interactions (“Nest”), coping with an overly-friendly customer (“Hyacinth”) or trespasser (“The Intruder”), Young highlights, with a disarming thoughtfulness, the inescapable tensions of individuality and, consequently, social groupings in a larger world—“what a shitshow, what a wasteland of doom,” as one story notes—defined by fractiousness and enmity. 

The collection’s west coast neighbourhoods might look inviting, but Young is fascinated by a middle class that’s relatively capable, intelligent, and comfortable and yet consistently hindered by themselves (and other like them) in achieving a simple goal like abiding friendship.

Pondering “the true jab and sting of existence,” Lena, in “Castoffs,” for instance, hopes to “abandon the sour normalcy of her thoughts” and joins an informal group of women who might befriend her. And yet, she leaves an event aware of a “cold disconnect”; a stride homeward, thoughts fixed on wine and “the happy dulling of her senses after the first glass,” suggests both the ease of solitude and its real limitations.   

Though each story dramatizes interpersonal friction with an effortlessness that’s nevertheless commanding, the title story is especially resonant. In it, a couple on a date night (that Amanda relishes and Erik admits “feels more obligatory that it should”) cannot quite escape their dissatisfactions. Erik later throws out his back, swallows more pain pills than advisable, and decides on a impromptu invitation to another couple—who initially give “off a self-effacing, almost bashful air.” Later: “they’re aggressive, all swagger.” The men decide to rectify a problem: a nearby tent dweller. “Squatter’s paradise end now,” blusterer Ross tells Erik, whose been assigned a sidekick role. Deeply funny and notably true-to-life, this story ends with a kind of monumental shrug, as though to say, Humanity, what a wreck, whether past, present, or future. Meh, there’s nothing to be done about it except to sigh, chuckle, and take notes. 

Brett Josef Grubisic

Brett Josef Grubisic resides on Salt Spring Island, BC, where he's currently at war with his sixth novel. Previous novels include The Age of Cities and My Two-Faced Luck.