‘This is just living’

Welcome to Sunny Town
by Théodora Armstrong

Calgary: Freehand Books, 2026
$24.95 / 9781997534112

Reviewed by Brett Josef Grubisic

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Remember Stash? Remember Eleanor?

To my knowledge, those edgy art-makers debuted at the tail-end of 1984, in a modest New Yorker short story titled “The Slaves in New York.”

Here’s a smidgen from the opening page, narrated by the anxious voice of Eleanor (“I was practically thirty years old, unmarried, and my marketability was going downhill fast’’):

So now I’m living in New York, the city, and what it is, it’s the apartment situation. I had a little apartment in an old brownstone on the upper West Side, but it was too expensive, and there were absolutely no inexpensive apartments to be found. Besides, things weren’t going all that smoothly for me. I mean, I wasn’t exactly earning money. I thought I’d just move to New York and sell my jewelry—I worked in rubber, shellacked sea horses, plastic James Bond-doll earrings—but it turned out a lot of other girls had already beaten me to it. So it was during this period that I gave up and told Stashua I was going home to live with my mother. Stash and I had been dating for six months. That was when Stash said we could try living together.

With the publication of Slaves of New York nearly two years later, the story’s author Tama Janowitz made her biggest literary splash. In that story collection Janowitz also helped usher in a coolly disaffected style and outlook, a depiction of early adulthood that an enterprising graduate student could link to Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, Lena Dunham’s Girls, and even recent fiction by Holly Brickley, Lindsay Wong, and Daniel Zomparelli. (So, I’m an adult. Now what?: Post-Adolescent Fugue, aka Existentialist Lassitude, in Contemporary Fiction: there, I’ve even done the work of handing that imaginary PhD student a working title for their dissertation.)

Over forty years after Eleanor and Stash trod the mean streets of Manhattan, North Vancouver writer and photographer Théodora Armstrong (Clear Skies, No Wind, 100% Visibility) introduces Maggie. In Welcome to Sunny Town, a novel that could well have been titled The Year of My Dissolution, Maggie is tangled in a predicament. A series of them, really. If she’s not cut from the exact same cloth as Eleanor, she’s a really close match.

Here’s Armstrong’s narrator recounting the “monotonous hours” of her workdays:

Outside of school, I spent most of my time at a minimum-wage job in a mall gallery downtown preparing bland, watery-coloured canvases for shipment, wrapping them in Styrofoam and packing tape. The painting ended up in the offices of insurance corporations or in the lobbies of the slapdash condominiums popping up all over the city…. When I wasn’t working in the mall gallery, I moped around the downtown core shopping for cheap shoes that gave me blisters or stopping — sometimes several times a day — at juice bars or coffee shops for overpriced drinks. I would meet up with Alex whenever I felt listless or horny and this made me feel worthless in a particular way I had never experience before in my life.

Arts student? check. Broke/in debt: check. Basement suite: uh-huh. Listless: often. Directionless: and then some. Jaded: yup. In a dead-end relationship with an older guy who’s also married and her professor: bingo. Her “marketability … going downhill fast”: hello. The campus clinic’s diagnosis: “anxiety and a bottle of miniature white pills.” Blood ties: “Our family was no longer a unit. We were all off on our own separate trajectories.”

Maggie’s glory days appear securely located in the very recent past. In the novel’s inaugural paragraph she gives us a glimpse of that happy and productive (albeit bygone) bohemianism: 

I met Jamie in there undergrad visual arts program at North Pacific University. The campus was set on an emerald peninsula of old-growth rainforests that stretched out into the great blue maw of the Strait of Georgia, and we spent four years together in shabby studios, making what we called art, occasionally escaping out on the trails down to Relic Beach to sun ourselves or smoke some good pot. 

Now Maggie’s her fifth year of a four-year program—the result, an arts advisor tells her, of lack of vision for her future. Souring by the hour, she’s also producing no work. For Maggie, the new millennium totally lacks promise. 

When Jamie sends his old friend an email with an enticing subject line—“Hi from across the Pacific Ocean!”—Maggie decides a change of scenery might be a tonic; in Vancouver, after all, there’s moping, shopping for cheap shoes, and “overwhelming blankness.” 

Even with its atmosphere of steady deflation and generalized misery, and despite Maggie’s level of self-regard, which might grow wearisome—quickly—in an actual person, the first part of Armstrong’s debut novel is a keeper. It’s wryly funny, for one. And as brought to life by Armstrong, Maggie is something of a mess, but one who can turn a phrase and puncture everything from her city’s cosmopolitan aspirations to her prof’s staggering ick-factor. That intelligence, readers feel, suggests that Maggie will get somewhere in the upcoming 350 pages.

There isn’t much plot in Part One. Maggie’s stock-taking establishes her character, circumstances, and immediate environment. It’s static, in sense, a survey of her life at the moment. For readers, Armstrong highlights Maggie’s quandaries—her “lack of vision,” for one, “overwhelming blankness” for another—and encourages us to project into the future, to envision Maggie life to come. 

Ample plot arrives immediately upon Maggie’s arrival in Okayama… Japan’s 23rd largest city. 

She’s “let go of everything”—sold her car, given away her clothes, broken up with the prof—with one caveat: “The only thing I couldn’t get rid of was debt in the form of a large student loan.” Maggie neglects to mention she hasn’t gotten rid of her self and whatever characteristics therein that had her so stymied in the first place. Given that, the change of scenery might not be quite the panacea she hopes for. 

She quickly spots Jamie and Murray, both drinking, and they drive her back to meet Jamie’s girlfriend Catherine (a former mall model and current walking disaster). At Sunny Town apartments, Maggie is soon part of a tight-knit (and tightly wound) group of expats; before she’s asked to leave, Maggie calls Sunny Town “communal living.” The gang routinely drink to excess. They fight. They have history and lots of it. Resentments, judgements, grudges. Plus, they’re wildly erratic (see: Catherine). And some of them work at Language Love Academy, an ESL school that subsequently hires Maggie. 

Across the next three parts, the novel grows episodic, deeply so. And the listlessness of Maggie seems to extend to the storytelling itself. A night at a bar. A rave. Sightseeing in Osaka. An urgent trip to Tokyo. Another visit to the local expat-owned bar.

For me, while reading, the episodes came across as moderately interesting; at the same time, drunken fights and accusations, hook-ups while drunk, vows not to drink, and so on, failed to leaven the plot with much sense of progression. Scene after scene added up to more of the same, give or take. A hundred pages shorter, meaning less repetition, would not have made an appreciable difference to the novel. Armstrong has an assured, stylish writing; with plotting, however, she comes across as not quite so surefooted.  

And despite Maggie’s realization in Okayama—“I can be anyone here”—the novel focusses less on Maggie’s interiority (which helped make Part One so attractive) and her character’s development; instead, it tends to favour the goings-on of an assortment of Sunny Town neighbours and their calamitous, hurtful interactions. To a degree as well, Maggie’s ongoing involvement with that crew (who to side with, who to sleep with, how to repair damage, etc) diminishes her light: her anguish over what to say or not to say in response to what Catherine says or does, for example, has a dulling effect on both the storytelling and our appreciation of Maggie. 

When Maggie spends time with Keiko, a troubled student-turned teacher, and Keiko’s brother, Jun, an accomplished potter, and the novel re-focusses on Maggie in a context free of squabbling, volatile expats, Welcome to Sunny Town regains a momentum that stalls in the numerous scenes with Jamie, Catherine, Murray, and co. When Maggie’s free of her cohort and squarely in Japan, she appears able to be herself (her “authentic self,” as she is prone to say) and worthwhile as a character with whom to spend time.

‘Literary brat pack’ author Jay McInerney reviewed Slaves of New York in the New York Times. He wrote, “Some readers will wish that Ms. Janowitz pressed her characters harder, brought us closer to their secrets and their dreams, brought them closer to something — knowledge, passion, hope, despair. Others will be grateful for the shrewd observation, the skewed invention, which are the gifts of a singular talent.” In regard to Welcome to Sunny Town I’ll echo that, while adding that a novel with fewer episodes and a greater sense of direction would have, ultimately, left me feeling greater satisfaction as I reached the final pages.

As a debt-burdened and directionless arts student, Brett Josef Grubisic taught at the Aoyama (Tokyo) branch of Berlitz, where he wore a necktie for the only time of his career. He assigns, edits, and posts fiction, poetry, and children’s lit reviews for BCR; occasionally, he contributes reviews as well. [He’s written about recent books by Faith Erin Hicks, Hetxw’ms Gyetxw, Nathan Fairbairn, Otoniya Bitek, Martin Butler, Hannah Beach and Maggie Hutchings, Zsuzsi Gartner (ed.), Jennifer Cooper, Caroline Adderson, Sunny Dhillon, Wanda John-Kehewin, Ryan O’Dowd, Michael V. Smith, David Bouchard, Alice Turski, Louise Sidley, K.J. Denny (ed.), Sonali Zohra, Carrie Anne Vanderhoop, Kristen Pendreigh, Sam Wiebe, Maureen Young, Daniel Anctil, and Adam Welch for BCR.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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