Bob Redmond's Reviews > Bad Monkeys

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.