Monkey ShinesA review by Gerry DonaghyJane Charlotte works for The Department of Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons, a division of a nameless organization dedicated to fighting evil. The nickname for her division is Bad Monkeys, and at the beginning of Matt Ruff's novel of the same name, Jane is being questioned by a police psychiatrist regarding her involvement in a recent murder. When asked if she punishes evil people, Jane responds glibly, "No. Usually we just kill them." But the victim in question wasn't evil and ensuing interrogation traces Jane's recruitment into the organization and the body count she's accumulated along the way.Matt Ruff is the kind of author who has yet to write the same book twice. While I was not a fan of his debut novel Fool on the Hill, I was quite impressed with both of his subsequent novels: the Edward Abbey-meets-Ayn Rand-via-Thomas Pynchon flavored Sewer, Gas and Electric, and the achingly stirring tale of multiple personality disorder Set This House in Order. Both are books that I've recommended without hesitation in the past and I'm happy to report that Bad Monkeys can be similarly endorsed.Bad Monkeys inhabits the same literary space as the drug-fueled paranoia of Philip K. Dick, owing a particular debt to Minority Report. In that story, the protagonist is a detective in a division of the police department that investigates what are called "pre-cog" crimes, arresting perpetrators before they have a chance to act on their impulses. In Ruff's universe, it's not a matter of seeing the future as much as handicapping it, singling out bad seeds and eradicating them. It's not about justice; it's about, as one the Bad Monkeys operatives puts it, "fighting evil in all its forms." Bad Monkeys is an intriguing exploration of moral relativism set in a plot so labyrinthine that it could have sprung from the mind of Borges if he wrote screenplays for Michael Bay. Often the lines between heroes and villains are blurred, and the organization, which is ostensibly fighting for good, engages in surveillance so ubiquitous and undetectable that Alberto Gonzales would be green with envy. And, there is never any explanation as to who charges the Bad Monkeys with their tasks or gave them a license to kill. It's a shadow organization whose umbra gets murkier the longer Jane works for them.But ultimately, as Jane is being interrogated, her reliability as a narrator is called into question as the psychiatrist presents evidence that refutes her testimony. Ruff throws the reader some astounding curveballs, often necessitating the need to re-read and re-re-read some passages to make tentative sense of what's going on. In this way, Bad Monkeys pleasingly resembles cinematic brain corkscrews such as Memento and The Usual Suspects.There was a review published recently in Bookforum about Bad Monkeys that not only gave away all of the plot surprises, but was fairly mean-spirited as well, stating, "I give away the surprise ending because I doubt anyone who reads this review will read Bad Monkeys." He then chides the author for not being Nabokov. Maybe I'm just another Kool-Aid drinker, or maybe this Bookforum critic is an irredeemable curmudgeon, but I don't think that's what Ruff was striving for. Rather, he's trying his hand at the pulp genre, writing a book that is practically begging to be turned into a film. Maybe that's a bad thing to some folks. But with a beguiling storyline and taut pacing, Bad Monkeys may not be Nabokov, but it is one hundred percent Matt Ruff. That alone makes it worth recommending.
I've attempted to not give away any pertinant inforation about the story, however if you don't want to know anything at all...don't read this review.I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from this book when I began reading it and I found my self scrutinizing the book in the beginning. I couldn’t decide if I liked, loved or would place it on the ‘don’t know what to think’ shelf. It was different; written almost entirely from a dialogue point of view, seen almost entirely from one characters point of view and you’re questioning the whole time, ‘Is she crazy, is this real, what will happen at the end’? It didn’t take long before I thought this is starting to get really interesting and strange and I think I like it. Early on, I only considered two options; she’s crazy and they’ll prove it… She’s not crazy and her “organization” will get her out of this. Usually I can figure out the ending to a book before I read it as most endings are predictable, this one threw me for a complete loop. It twisted and turned, which augmented my interest in the book and added to the oddity of the story. The entire book was a complete plan that you were not privy to until the last chapter. You were fooled the whole way through. Early on in the book, when she was talking about doing something with her life and yet all she had done was do drugs and jump from job to job I thought it was strange that the good people would want her (and no wonder why they wanted her…) Later in the book when I almost believed she was good, just lost along the way, I thought I can’t believe they are going to turn her bad when she was trapped by the bad Monkey’s. This is what I loved about the book. I like being kept in suspense until the very end. I like not knowing what’s going to happen until it happens. This book was far from predictable in its outlandishness! And even though it was right there in front of my face, I didn’t really acknowledge the idea of where she was. With all the killing going on around her I truly believed she had been caught and was in a mental institution. Finding out about the doctor was, was the best part!! The premise behind the book was a great. Jane was a great actress in the story. Attempting to make us believe she’s been hallucinating and creating a vision of people that weren’t really there. At about the halfway mark, I thought her brother is dead and she is imaging him coming to her because she is guilty that she allowed him to be killed. And I think the Evil Jane Twin was really her, she stepped outside of the box and described it as if she was looking through the window. It was her way of describing to us how bad she really was, and thinking the whole time she was fooling us into believing the Bad Monkey’s actually created a twin Jane to attempt to bring her down (which she had me going at one point). The whole story made me really think that she was sick in the head and the end of it proved that even though it all existed (she hadn’t made all of it all up), she was definitely sick in the head!!Overall, I enjoyed this story and I really liked the book. I’ve given it 4 stars and I would recommend it as a silly, quirky, strange read to any one who likes that kind of book. It was imaginative and interesting…and it was fun to read!!
What do You think about Bad Monkeys (2007)?
One of those books that starts out great and then totally falls apart. It opens with Jane Charlotte having been arrested for murder in Las Vegas; when she told the police she’s part of a secret government organization (code name: Bad Monkeys) she ended up in the psych ward. The book is comprised of her interviews with the doctor there alternating with her first person account of her story. For about two-thirds of the book, this is fascinating: Ruff—whose Set This House in Order, about Dissociative Identity Disorder, I still want to read—is really skilled at making the reader wonder if Jane’s story is true or the result of her being a total whackjob. But then, something that Ruff had been doing a good job hinting at was revealed as fact in about the least subtle way possible. That alone would have been a minor misstep, but it unfortunately signaled worse things to come. Suddenly plot twists were heaped on plot twists; I was left staring at the (beautifully designed, alas) book, going, “When did this become a bad M. Night Shyamalan movie?” (If one discards The Sixth Sense, that’s kind of redundant, isn’t it?) I shut the (incredibly cool, elongated yellow plastic) cover with no idea what this book was actually supposed to be about, what it was trying to say. Maybe I expected too much from Ruff—based solely on an excerpt from Set This House in Order—but I was deeply disappointed.
—Trin
In this story, the protagonist--a thirty-something Femme Nikita--faces an interrogation that exposes her sordid, adventurous, secret-agent past, and eventually illuminates her moral state as good or evil (I won't divulge which). Told in episodic backstory, the novel covers the twin tropes of brotherhood: from the macro (Big Brother is Watching) to the micro ("am I my brother's keeper?"). It also has plenty of serial killing, drugs, geeky technology and plastic explosives.The book is an ungainly stew of Kurt Vonnegut, Chuck Palahniuk, Daniel Defoe, and Franz Kafka. The police state--as well as the emotional states--it describes get more extreme with each chapter, and Ruff reaches for some kind of Statement About Humanity towards the end, which falls flat because he's basically exhausted his story partway through.In the first two thirds, Ruff--to his credit--suggests but never divulges the key signature of the piece. Rather than performing an autopsy of his concerns, he animates them with extremely well-written scenes including those of the protagonist's runaway days and later, of her misadventures as a liquor store clerk. He introduces minor characters who have dimension and spends time on physical and theoretical landscape, with room on the narrative stage for all of it, in turns, to crackle, snap, and breathe. Are we in northern California, or in some wasteland watching Cain and Abel march off together? Is the obvious middle-aged man in a white van really a serial killer? Is the girl in the white room making shit up about Keyser Soze, or is she a sympathetic refugee from a war between secret agencies?In fact, the book is quite a page-turner, at least until about 160 pages in. But then, Ruff trades in most of the minor characters for new ones with progressively more cartoonish identities (with names like "Love" and "Wise," for instance). And forget one Deus Ex Machina to wrap things up: in this book there are a whole crew of Deities (actually, clowns), while tons of explosives and some magic drugs completely obliterate the space-time continuum and any remaining narrative gravity along with it.So finally the book becomes an idea of a book. Or an incomplete novel worthy of Vonnegut is followed by an essay on human nature in the form of a Henry Miller daydream filtered through a Michael Mann film? It's an interesting dish, but like one culinary experiment in which I glazed some meat with maple syrup, it ends up not tasting as good as one would hope.Three stars for belting a double off the wall but getting thrown out at third to end the game.
—Bob Redmond
I've read a good deal of reviews, and not everyone likes this book. Some people think it fell apart after the beginning, and I'm going to have disagree. I think that when you read this book, you have to be ready to go for a ride - and if you get on the train and are willing to take you where it's going to take you, you won't be disappointed.I will say this though, I felt that as the book neared its conclusion, the story was not as well developed as it was at the beginning. You sort of get the impression, however subtle, that the end of the book didn't undergo as much development, editing, and generally didn't take as much time as the beginning. It's as if as Ruff got to the end of the book just let the story sweep him away and finished it as quickly as possible. You can't blame him though, the story does sweep you away.The characters are amazing. You will not believe where you find yourself at the end of the story - you will not believe how attached you've become to the real villain and how much you want that person to win, even if you are willing to accept that they are evil.I'd read it again and recommend it without hesitation.
—Elizabeth Bingham
