Matt Ruff, Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls

[truepenny]

This year's Tiptree winner. Although I understand from various things that have been said that Set This House in Order was a sort of compromise winner, I have to say that I'm really glad it won, because otherwise I would most likely not have read it, and that would have been deeply unfortunate. This is, as Nisi Shawl said when introducing Matt Ruff, a really really really really really really good book. It's true that it has no overtly SFnal elements, but also true, as Ruff said, that it has a distinctively SF sensibility. And the stuff it does with gender is intense and interesting and really worth the price of admission.


Since I've read both Sybil and When Rabbit Howls, I couldn't help noticing the parallels between those two real-life cases and the characters that Ruff invents. Penny Driver seems to be a more "classic" MPD (or DID or whatever the acronym of the week is), with the few simple and strongly differentiated personalities, most of them with genders conforming to the biology of the body: Mouse, Maledicta, Malefica, Loins, Thread, and the protector Duncan. There are at least two other personalities (the walker and the runner), but they are never given names nor have anything to say for themselves. And the parallels with Sybil are striking: Penny Driver, like Sybil, is tortured by her mother. Penny, like Sybil, ultimately chooses reintegration, and although Andrew doesn't like it, I think the novel is fairly clear that for her it's the right choice.

The other complex of characters, the identities inhabiting the body of Andy Gage, is more difficult to talk about. First off, I need to say I think Andrew is one of the most charming unreliable narrators I've ever encountered. I'm looking forward, on a re-read, to sorting out just how much of what Andrew tells the reader is mistaken or misinformed or an out and out lie. It's easy to read against Andrew to see the truth about Julie; much harder to read against him to see the truth about Aaron.

Andy Gage's situation has some close parallels to Truddi Chase's: the brutal and unrelenting abuse by a stepfather (always referred to as "the stepfather," which is also a commonality with Truddi Chase); a mother who must have known but chose to do nothing; the wide range of splintered identities, especially the nameless and wordless children; the choice not to reintegrate. Where things get really interesting is not that there are personalities with genders opposed to the biological body, but that almost all of Andy Gage's identities have chosen genders opposed to the biological body. Of the main identities we meet in the course of the novel--Andrew, Aaron, Gideon, Xavier Reyes, Jake, Adam, Aunt Sam, Seferis, Simon--only Aunt Sam is female. There are other identities with female names, but they are mostly just part of the largely undifferentiated mass of children. The fact that Sam is largely passive and ineffectual could be taken as stereotyping of gender roles, except for one crucial fact:

"Andrea Samantha Gage. That's my legal name."
"Your mother named you Andrea?"
"Yes," Andrew tells her, his voice sullen. "The body is female."
(Ruff 380)

(The reveal on Andrew's biological sex actually happens earlier (237), but I love this exchange so much I had to quote it.) Both main characters are biologically female, and this makes the habitual identification of Andy Gage's personalities as male ... well, it's why I think this book deserves the Tiptree, anyway.

This is a story about monsters, both real and imaginary. One could argue that there's something monstrous about Penny Driver and Andy Gage, in the older sense of monstrum, something weird, something both wonder-ful and awe-ful, in their old senses. Mouse thinks she herself is a monster. Andrew thinks that Gideon is a monster and worries that he may have to take responsibility for Gideon's monstrosity. But as monsters go, Gideon turns out to be both vulnerable and naïve, and no part of Penny Driver is monstrous at all. Both Driver and Gage are inhabited by children playing dress-up, some in adult clothes and some in masks with fangs.

But the book is also full of real monsters: the man who murdered Mrs. Winslow's husband and sons, Warren Lodge (who reminds me of that other Tiptree-winning novel about monsters, Wild Life), Verna Driver, Horace Rollins. And Althea Gage and (I would argue) Julie Sivik. It may be unfair to call Julie a monster, but the degree to which she fucks with Andrew's head through the course of the novel leads me to believe she deserves it. She is thoughtless, meddling, cruel both intentionally and unintentionally. The fact that things do turn out more or less all right is no fault of Julie's, even though she precipitates most of the book's major plot points. I personally was relieved when she freaked out about the fact that Andrew's body is female because it meant she couldn't get her claws any farther into him.

Verna's monstrosity (like Horace Rollins's) is obvious, and I don't think I need to explain it any farther. Althea's monstrosity is visible in the wreckage of lives she leaves behind: Andy Gage is the most obvious and enduring example, but I think we also see Althea's poison, not merely in the fact that she accepted marriage with Horace Rollins and what he did to her daughter, but in Chief Bradley's last encounter with Silas Gage (444-45), and in the warped psyche of Bradley himself. Andrew gets it exactly right when he says, "I can't claim to understand my mother's motivations any better than you did, but one thing I've figured out about her is that she didn't give her love to anyoned who really needed it" (447). Althea is the quietest of the monsters in the book, but possibly also the most terrible.


---
WORKS CITED
Ruff, Matt. Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls. 2003. New York: Perennial-HarperCollinsPublishers, 2004. ISBN 0-06-095485-X

Comments

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

I think Julie Sivik is a Jamesian monster in 21st-century dress.

I, too, am glad the book won the Tiptree, because I wouldn't have read it otherwise, but it did mean I had the gender-reveal as the likeliest possibility for the refusal to offer spoilers even before I started the book, and felt that it was confirmed before the explicit reveal by Mouse thinking Andrew looked like a girlish man. The question for me wasn't whether Andy Gage's body was female but who around Andrew knew this.

I think, in some ways, the book's reflections on gender strike me as less interesting than its reflections on identity--that becomes a kind of misleading word, because it is neither uniform nor singular. There is a contemporary philosopher of neurology who argues that the concept of unified identity is a serviceable illusion and it's more accurate to think of consciousness as a set of independent homunculi sometimes working against each other and sometimes working in concert; and both Andy Gage and the reintegrated Penny strike me as arguments for this view.

I don't think Althea is particularly subtle as far as monsters go, but then I have particularly furious feelings against parents who "merely" consent to the abuse of their children, and have watched several friends painfully go through the process of having to realize the complicity of the "good" parent in their abuse. And one of the touches I liked was the way in which both Mouse and Aaron/Andrew constructed good parents--first by the projection onto a dead figure (Mouse) and the suppression of Althea's complicity (Aaron/Andrew), and then later through the selection of a therapist and/or external figure to be a more active good parent (Dr. Grey for Aaron, Mrs. Winslow for Andrew, Dr. Eddington for Mouse, who makes the connection explicit, all of them selecting a replacement the same gender as the "good" parent).

I liked how neither therapist seemed to consider the predominance of male "souls" in Andrea a problem, although admittedly that was screened through Andrew's loveable but not especially perceptive pov. I do think Ruff suggests it's a response to trauma--the earliest, nameless Witnesses are female; I didn't think Aunt Sam was helpless or stereotypical, but I do think it's significant that the only adult female persona is the one specifically attached to an escape attempt--but he seems to be suggesting that in this case it's a creative and useful response to trauma, and there's no point in messing with it.

I did like the emphasis on the idea that different people require different therapies and different solutions, which you'd think was a simple concept to grasp except that it is so seldom the approach taken.

The final Chief Bradley subplot was unnecessarily dramatic, I thought, although I see why Ruff felt he needed it to get all the symbolism in place.

I wonder how old Aaron is, in his self-perception. It's not at all clear to me.

I'll need to think about this more.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

As per usual, I have expressed myself badly. You'd think, with the advanced English degree(s) and all, I could do better.

1. I agree totally that Althea is the most purely evil person in the book. I meant (although--I freely admit--did not say) that her evil emerges much more slowly into the reader's perception, and that it's much less gaudy than the evil of Verna Driver or Horace Rollins.

2. Maybe I just read more naively, but I was genuinely surprised by the reveal on the biological sex of Andy Gage's body.

3. Gender and identity. Especially the way that Andrew and the other male souls consider the body's biological sex so completely irrelevant.

4. I hadn't noticed the bit about the construction of a "good" parent as explicitly as you pointed it out. Thank you.

5. I'm puzzled by this: the only adult female persona is the one specifically attached to an escape attempt. Escape attempt from what? Sam attempts suicide, and is part of the abortive rebellion to flee to New Mexico. But the only clear escapes I see in the novel are (1.) Penny Driver going to U.Wash., and (2.) Aaron/Gideon escaping from the evil psychiatrist in Michigan. What are you thinking of as an escape attempt in this context?

6. I think "stereotype" was the wrong word, but Sam is definitely a performance of femininity, and not a performance of modern femininity, either. She's a lady by an older definition of what that means--although possibly one that both Althea and Verna would recognize.

7. I agree that Chief Bradley ended up being an overly melodramatic figure, but like you, see why Ruff did it.

8. Aaron is the character who most puzzles/troubles me. He and Gideon, who in some sense are the core of Andy Gage's personalities. Dark and light twins. The fact that Andrew calls Aaron "father" led me (wrongly, I think) to envision Aaron as a sort of paterfamilias. Another reason I need to reread the book (when heres_luck is done with it *g*) is to read against Andrew to try to get a clearer and better picture of Aaron. Because Aaron's behavior, viewed objectively (as opposed to through the heavy filter of Andrew) is that of a rather difficult and fucked-up person in their late twenties. I.e., Aaron's age and the body's biological age may match up better than I was reading them to do. (I may also have been influenced in this feeling, now that I think about it, by When Rabbit Howls, because Truddi Chase has a father-figure personality who is much older than any of the others and who is even suggested to be a sort of semi-reincarnation of a druid(?--it's been a long time since I read the book). So sloppy reading on my part may have contributed to my confusion.) And the fact that we never get to see Aaron except through Andrew, or in second-hand reports, does not help.

I ended the book wanting to know a lot more about Aaron and Gideon.

Also, and this is occurring to me, what about the onomatology? Penny Driver's identities are fairly straightforward, but, while I'm clued in enough to recognize that there are Biblical resonances to the names that Andy Gage's personalities choose (Aaron, Gideon, Andrew, Simon, Jacob, Adam), I'm not quite clued in enough to make sense of them--except that Adam is obviously, despite his age, the "old Adam" in Andy Gage.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

You have not either expressed yourself badly!

I'm puzzled by this: the only adult female persona is the one specifically attached to an escape attempt. Escape attempt from what? Sam attempts suicide, and is part of the abortive rebellion to flee to New Mexico.

I'm thinking of the New Mexico attempt. The earliest mentions of Sam we get are (I think) her attempt to flee to New Mexico with Jimmy. She may have existed before then, but I thought it possible that she was only called into existence to deal with Jimmy, who offered an escape from Rollins' house, though she clearly had other aspects as well.

I also read Aaron as being old enough to be Andrew's biological father, and am not sure that's right -- especially since Gideon basically reads like a teenager to me.

It's hard to read Aaron because both Andrew *and* Penny see him as a reassuring and authoritative figure.

[heresluck]

I also read Aaron as being old enough to be Andrew's biological father, and am not sure that's right -- especially since Gideon basically reads like a teenager to me.

Interesting; I read Gideon as older than that. Still self-centered and mean, but older than (for example) Adam.

Possibly I'm just scrounging here in order to justify my own perceptions -- I too read Aaron as older -- but am I remembering right that (at least within Andy Gage's house) souls don't age unless they're running the body? If Aaron was the one usually in charge for some years, and Gideon's been (mostly) stuck on Coventry, that might explain the apparent age difference.

I didn't think Julie quite so monstrous as you two did. I think she's rather like Gideon, actually; more manipulative and less mean (which is not necessarily to say less cruel) than Gideon, but like him fundamentally focused on herself: her ridiculous business idea, her pet weirdo friend, her sulks, etc. She's awful, certainly -- it takes a while to realize how awful, because of the Andrew-filter -- but she's awful in such... normal ways that I'm reluctant to lump her in the same category as Horace, Verna, Althea, Warren Lodge. But maybe that's me being unduly cynical about People In General.

[coffeeandink.livejournal.com]

didn't think Julie quite so monstrous as you two did. I think she's rather like Gideon, actually; more manipulative and less mean (which is not necessarily to say less cruel) than Gideon, but like him fundamentally focused on herself: her ridiculous business idea, her pet weirdo friend, her sulks, etc. She's awful, certainly -- it takes a while to realize how awful, because of the Andrew-filter -- but she's awful in such... normal ways that I'm reluctant to lump her in the same category as Horace, Verna, Althea, Warren Lodge. But maybe that's me being unduly cynical about People In General.

I think that the difference between Julie and the rest of them is that Julie's convinced herself she means well, whereas the rest of them have just convinced themselves they're entitled to what they want. Julie's convictions mean she'll try to live up to them occasionally.

I suppose I half agree with you, in that she's very normal; I just am so horrified by her carelessness with other people that I don't find this consoling.

I hadn't thought of the Gideon comparison, so I'll need to think about it some more.

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

I, too, am glad the book won the Tiptree, because I wouldn't have read it otherwise, but it did mean I had the gender-reveal as the likeliest possibility for the refusal to offer spoilers even before I started the book, and felt that it was confirmed before the explicit reveal by Mouse thinking Andrew looked like a girlish man. The question for me wasn't whether Andy Gage's body was female but who around Andrew knew this.

ah, see, i was convinced that it had won the tiptree for dealing with male and female souls in the same body. totally convinced. right up until julie groped him.