Short-fiction collection extraordinary

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This article was published 05/11/2016 (3279 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Canada can claim many masters of the short story — Carol Shields, Margaret Laurence, Lisa Moore, Alice Munro, Guy Vanderhaeghe — and with her latest collection, Canadian writer Clea Young proves she has the chops to add her name to this illustrious list.

Young, who lives in Vancouver, is a three-time contributor to the Journey Prize Stories and has had work published in many literary magazines.

Young’s original voice will draw readers in immediately; at only 224 pages, Teardown could easily be read in one sitting. There is some repetition among the 12 stories, but all are thought-provoking, and Young’s many-layered characters lend each story an unarguable authenticity.

The setups for Young’s stories are ordinary: two brothers on a camping trip; young parents on a weekend escape to Whistler; a father chaperoning his daughter’s class trip, but every relationship is its own minefield, the dangers lurking beneath the surface of everyday life.

Young uses these non-events as catalysts for her many-layered characters, who are anything but ordinary. When the dust settles, the outcomes are shocking, hilarious, heart-rending, or all three. And there’s definitely some borderline lunatic behaviour.

Searching for somewhere to fit in, a nameless woman crashes a random office party (and brings her resumé). A chance meeting with an unsavoury ex-boyfriend on a ferry incites Mia to swipe a danish from the cafeteria on board. A crushing loneliness convinces Maddie that 10 minutes after emerging from laser eye surgery — still blind — it would be a good idea to hook up with a stranger in the waiting room.

The point Young is trying to make is while we may live ordinary lives, we are mysterious, complicated creatures who often don’t act in our own best interest — as she puts it, we “self-sabotage.” When life throws us a curveball, it can make us do crazy things.

Congratulations and Regrets is one of Young’s most well-crafted and dispiriting such stories: a single woman finds temporary comfort in a silicone baby from Wayne’s Plastics and Personals, a prop used in the hospital midwifery department where she works, after being ousted by her roommate in favour of her new boyfriend.

“I was so distraught that one morning I forgot my helmet and almost collided with one of the blue equipment vans… I shook all day, first with fear, then with the crazy thought that it wasn’t all about me — you’d simply fallen in love. Surely people in love still needed friends.”

In a sense, every one of Young’s stories is about congratulations and regrets. In every relationship, there is a time to offer congratulations and a time for regrets. Teardown shows us these moments with brutal clarity — these are conflicted people trying to figure things out the only way they know how. Aren’t we all?

Lindsay McKnight works in the arts in Winnipeg and has been known to do the odd crazy thing.