Grey
Jon Armstrong
Night Shade Books, 2007
Trade Paperback
248 pages
$15.00

The cover art is intriguing and it's a perfect fit for this novel of highly stylized writing and storytelling. Jeremy Geddes paints a surreal mix of grey tones with only a touch of color that represents the author’s main character as both a young man who lacks color not only in how he dresses but as a person. He’s a nineteen year-old, parasitic momma’s boy who depends on his father’s income. Although he transforms into a young man eventually, through a combination of love and sacrifice, he never represents the “everyman”. Most readers will not empathize or even sympathize with this young man. But this indecisive, adolescent narrator serves the author’s point to great effect. Armstrong is not telling a simplistic story to entertain; he is weaving an allegory of our time. With the current fascination of American pop culture at an all-time high, where the demand for photographs of such vacuous personalities as Paris Hilton have created a glut of paparazzi, it is inevitable that we see parodies, poignant satires of these fancifully garbed caricatures—people the general public love to see rise to terrific popularity only to be necessarily crushed eventually. It’s an age-old tale, to be sure. The public build these personalities up only to knock them down. We might hypothesize and analyze for page upon page why the public feeds on such a destructive cycle but to no point. The fact is that the trend exists and Armstrong demonstrates it accurately through his first person narrator, the young, male socialite—a character on the level of a Hilton, Britney Spears or the recently deceased Anna Nicole Smith (the focus solidly placed on the fashionable designs of clothing as a metaphor). Does Armstrong succeed? At delivering an allegorical tale, yes. But is the novel worth reading based on this alone? The story is outrageously over-done. In one instance, when asked what skills he has, the narrator cannot even respond—he hasn’t even the ability to answer a question (to be fair, he was a terrific dancer at one time, but he refuses to dance anymore). The irony in that alone is representative of the book. If you enjoy or, better yet, prefer a more literary than commercial read and you can appreciate a satirical stab at not only the fashionable elite of entertainment but a subtle yet obvious social comment on the general public and its destructive nature, then give Grey a read; it will not disappoint you.