Grey

Judy MacDonald

Arsenal Pulp

When Judy MacDonald spoke about her writ­ing recently in Vancouver, she fas­ci­nated her audi­ence with glimpses into how her mind works and the weird angle from which she observes the world. She describes her­self as a mag­pie, some­one who col­lects her mate­r­ial from small, odd moments in every­day life: char­ac­ters, images and sto­ries found in news­pa­per clip­pings or observed on bus rides. Maybe the sto­ries in her collection Grey (Arsenal Pulp) started out as quirky anec­dotes told by friends, or odd inci­dents reported in the news. If so, many of the quirky or odd bits must have been lost on the way from the source mate­r­ial to the book. Stories like “Writer’s Block,” in which the seven-year-old pro­tag­o­nist leaves home and lives in an old cabin by her­self, smok­ing cig­ars and drink­ing Scotch, or “It,” where lit­tle boys are at their creepy best, stand out for their sub­stance and wit in a col­lec­tion of overly detailed descrip­tions of ordi­nary char­ac­ters doing for­get­table things. MacDonald says she tries not to take her writ­ing too seri­ously, and of course a book doesn’t have to make grand state­ments about the mean­ing of life. But if a story does lit­tle more than present us with a flat account of some­thing that is kind of inter­est­ing, why should we read it? Why not clip the news­pa­per arti­cle or ride the bus our­selves? Chris, the doltish man in “boy­girl­happy,” sums up how I felt after fin­ish­ing the book: “[Elaine] says, ‘I just thought you might be inter­ested.’ Chris says, ‘Interested in what? I don’t have a clue what the story is. I don’t know what the point is.’” But maybe MacDonald would tell me, as Elaine tells Chris, “I wasn’t think­ing about a point. I was just say­ing what hap­pened. Forget it.”