Bad Monkeys/Matt Ruff

This is not my usual fair; I will own that going in. I read this on recommendation of someone close to me. I've never read any other Ruff, but I'm told this is somewhat unlike his other offerings.

From the very first page, I was hooked. The novel opens with stage like descriptions of the "scene." "White walls. White ceiling. White floor. Not featureless, but close enough to raise suspicion that its few contents are all crucial to the upcoming drama." As much as I hate to be told how to feel, in this case, I am amused. Laying out the characters in their space, Ruff creates a feeling of claustrophobia. However, no matter how claustrophobic it's still a blank canvas and you have to wonder: who gets to do the painting?

Jane Charlotte it would appear, but then maybe not. I immediately like Jane. She's sassy. She's in the Clark County Detention Center "the nut wing" for killing someone she wasn't suppose to kill. Right away you know she's delusional enough to believe there are people she is suppose to kill. She believes she works for a secret "organization" that fights evil, not crime mind you, evil. So the stage is set with a pithy, supercool protagonist in a novel where all the apparatus are intentionally, and mostly effectively, put on display. Unraveling the mystery of who is delusional or not and why then becomes the action of the novel.

The novel itself is a fast read, so fast that the reader find themselves feeling like they missed something. Sometimes I did, only to realize it was intentional withholding, revealed a few pages later. The work play is probably what kept me reading this novel. As the reader gets further and further into the mind of Jane, it becomes evident how much truth in any situation relies on the language available to express sit. The simple meanings, with all good postmodernist know are never simple, of every day works convolute and confuse not just the telling of the story but the action itself.

At the root of the story, is, of course, who or what is evil and who gets to decide. Those lines are at times effectively blurred, and at times so ineffectively that you find yourself not so much caring one way or another.

Finally, for this reader, although I was compelled to follow Jane down the rabbit hole, the ending was too pat. At the end of novel that bends all kinds of rules, I expected much bigger things. But then ultimately that might have been the point. No matter how crazy the maze or how deftly the language is rendered, the final verdict since the days of bad guys in black and heroes with white hats always, by definition feels somewhat mundane.