Judy MacDonald’s first book, Jane, was a novella-length monologue delivered by a teenage girl whose relationship with an older boy moves from troubling to dangerous to psychotic. The messed-up teenage voice is flawless, making for a creepy and claustrophobic read. The 27 stories collected in Grey, moving from childhood through adulthood, old age, death, and beyond, are told from similarly subjective viewpoints but are rarely so compelling.

“Red” is an interesting miniature, a brief sketch of simmering hostilities at a backyard barbecue. Throughout the story MacDonald demonstrates her skill with voice, nailing character, especially a particular kind of boor, through pithy dialogue.

In many of the stories, though, the reader is given only one voice – a maudlin, oversensitive one that takes the harshness of the surrounding world as an insurmountable given. In “boygirlhappy” the unhappy protagonist “longs for a time when everyone could love how and whom they please without fear.” In “The Language of Safety” the low-fat banana bran muffin-eating central character cringes from the perils of modern urban life. The story concludes with the sentence, “She doesn’t know where to go, where to hide.” Compared with the sharp wit MacDonald demonstrates elsewhere, this is literary infantilism.

There is a wealth of intriguing, original ideas in this collection. The childhood stories are the collection’s strongest, perhaps because the young protagonists are more likely to grapple with, rather than simply succumb to, their environments, resulting in much greater narrative vitality. In the later stories, the bright spots tend to get overwhelmed by the surrounding self-pity. The image, in “Dreamy,” of Stanley Kubrick spending his time in the afterlife filming a Marx Brothers-style musical comedy, is priceless, but it gets squandered by a narrative voice too self-absorbed to pursue it.