Review:
Set This House in Order, by Matt Ruff
| Publisher: |
Perennial |
| Copyright: |
2003 |
| Printing: |
2004 |
| ISBN: |
0-06-095485-X |
| Format: |
Trade paperback |
| Pages: |
479 |
A textbook case history would say that Andy Gage has disassociative
identity disorder (referred to here as the more common although medically
inaccurate "multiple personality disorder" for reasons of clarity and to
match casual speech, according to the author). However, that's a
completely inadequate description. A better description would be that
Andy Gage's body is inhabited by a large set of different personalities,
who take turns being in control. The original Andy Gage is dead,
shattered by horrific childhood abuse. Aaron became the dominant
personality and gave structure to the internal geography of the mind they
all share, with the help of extensive counselling. But Aaron was
exhausted by being the public face and maintaining control of the shared
body. Hence, Andrew.
Andrew Gage is the first-person narrator of half of this book. He is
twenty-eight, the same age as the body, but he's only existed for two
years. He considers Aaron his father, since Aaron called him out of the
lake inside their internal metal geography. His purpose is to run the
body and be the public face of the family. He is by turns capable and
naive, shy on personal experience, but able to get the help of the others.
The one heard from most frequently is Adam, a rude and mischevious
teenager who also has an uncanny ability to read other people, and who
frequently watches through the body's eyes from what the family calls the
"pulpit" and gives Andrew advice.
Andrew works for Julie Sivik, a woman he met the day he quit his job at a
big-box store because he couldn't explain his behavior to his boss without
discussing being a multiple. Julie is a wholly impractical, slightly
unethical, well-meaning force of chaos who serves as the thread that draws
the plot of the book together. She's running a startup on ingenuity and
borrowed money that is attempting to create a comprehensive and
customizable virtual reality world. She's the one who finds Penny and
hires her, in part for her skills, and in part to push Penny and Andrew
together.
Penny Driver has the same condition as Andrew, but Penny is only vaguely
aware of it. The world for her is full of blackouts, lost time, waking up
in strange and sometimes horrific situations, and attempting to structure
her life based on notes left for herself that she didn't write. When she
meets Andrew, she's barely making it through life; thankfully, one of her
personalities is remarkably good at computers, and that has been enough to
make a living despite the chaos. But Julie is the unintentional catalyst
for her losing that job, the best job she's ever had, leaving her with no
real alternative but to take the job with Julie's company.
There are a few things that are important to say up-front about this book.
First, neither I nor the author are actually multiples (or, put another
way, neither of us have DID), and writing about atypical mental states is
fraught with peril. It's very easy to misrepresent other people's
experiences, and multiple personalities in particular are frequent
material for dramas of all sorts. There's something people find
inherently fascinating about the idea, and it's easy for that fascination
to run away with reality and distort the lived experience. I recommend
reading Ruff's
FAQ about the book, which spells out what his goals are and what
approach he took. I did some quick searches and didn't uncover a lot of
anger or dislike of the book among either people who have DID or
psychiatrists, and it seems true to the descriptions of internal reality
I've heard from people who are multiples. But despite being more
respectful of real experience than most fictional treatments of DID, this
is still a work of fiction written by someone without first-hand
experience, and it's worth keeping that in mind.
Second, DID is an intensely controversial diagnosis among psychiatrists.
There are, generally speaking, two major controversies. One is over
whether or not DID can actually be caused by traumatic experiences such as
childhood abuse, or whether it is a creation of psychiatrists, a mental
model that they've imposed on their patients or convinced their patients
to believe.
Set This House in Order comes down firmly on the first
side of that controversy: that DID can be created by abuse and is not a
creation of psychotherapy. (So, I should note, does every multiple that
I've ever talked to or read.) Second, there is significant controversy
over treatment, with some psychiatrists believing that integration of the
personalities into one is the only true treatment, and others believing
that multiples can remain stable and functional as multiple personalities.
Set This House in Order leans strongly towards the view that
multiples can be stable as multiples and that while integration may be
appropriate for some, it's not for all. Both of these viewpoints are
presented very convincingly by the narrative in the book, and both are
consistent with the beliefs of a lot of multiples, but it's worth
remembering that these are active and often quite heated controversies and
a novel is not evidence.
It's good to be aware of both of those points, and to read
Put This
House in Order as something of a what-if, where much more is clear about
DID than is actually clear in our world. But once one has done that, one
is in for an excellent book.
I loved this book from start to finish. (Well, okay, I felt some surprise
at the nature of the ending, but it grew on me after further
consideration.) It's simply a brilliant novel, with a little bit of
everything: very good characterization, messy love affairs, the satisfying
tension of someone overcoming great odds to put themselves together with
the help of friends, a startlingly original perspective of the world, some
excellent surprises, and some absolutely wonderful characters. Andrew is
a good choice of narrator: he brings an earnest calm to a story that could
otherwise be quite chaotic and provides a great vantage point for the
reader. And I found Penny (and particularly some of her other souls)
impossible not to like.
Set This House in Order is a tense book in places, and it's a book
where people's lives break down before they can get better. It's also a
book about rather horrific abuse, and while nearly all of the specifics
happen off-stage, imagination fills in some nasty details. But Ruff
manages to write it with a structure and with enough calm assurance that I
felt just reassured enough without taking away the tension. That's a
tricky balance; few books do it better.
And the supporting characters are a delight. One might think, with all
the complexity happening for both Andrew and Penny, that Ruff wouldn't
have room in the narrative for other characters, but one would be wrong.
There are very few saints and demons here, just a lot of complex people,
with their own problems and their own perspectives, who are generally
trying to do the best they can from day to day. There are some clear-cut
villains in the past Ruff wisely makes no attempt to add shades of grey
to abusers but even there one can see some clear signs of untreated
severe mental illness and chaotic lives rather than mustache-twirling
pre-meditated villainy. This is, in short, a book full of people, in all
their messy complications, which is what makes it so delightful.
I'm not going to say anything more about the plot, or even the various
personalities, since discovering the direction of the book was so much of
the fun. I will say that, despite the subject matter and some of the
events, the book is surprisingly gentle. One of the things about it that
I loved the most was the emotional tone Ruff gave to being a multiple: the
sense of a squabbling but tight-knit family looking out for each other. I
can't judge the reality of this impression, but it makes for a wonderful
story.
Highly recommended. The best book I've read so far this year.
Rating: 10 out of 10
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