The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Set This House in Order, by Matt Ruff
reviewed by Chad W. Post

Matt Ruff. Set This House in Order. HarperCollins, 2003. 479 pp. $25.95.

Subtitled “A Romance of Souls,” Matt Ruff’s third novel (Fool on the Hill; Sewer, Gas & Electric) is essentially a love story of sorts between two people suffering from multiple personality disorder. This novel is narrated entirely by Andy Gage, a twenty-six-year-old who through therapy was able to create a workable system for living with her twenty-plus personalities. Currently living in Seattle, Andy lives an orderly and restrained life until Penny—another girl suffering from multiple-personality disorder—comes to work at the virtual-reality company where Andy is employed. Penny doesn’t know that she’s a multiple when she first meets Andy, but one of her other personalities enlists Andy’s help in getting Penny to acknowledge and deal with her chaotic life situation. A series of traumatic occurrences ensue—including an encounter with a man who murdered his family, which causes a relapse on Andy’s part in which her body is taken over by one of her “bad” personalities—before Penny is finally able to come to terms with her mental landscape and order is restored to Andy’s life. Putting aside the highly unlikely scenario of these two people meeting one another, there is something compelling about the plot development of this novel. Ruff is a decent writer, although his earlier books (especially Sewer, Gas & Electric) were much funnier, riskier, and more interesting. There is a certain voyeuristic element to this book, which really hurts it; a sort of “what would it be like if?” quality that is intriguing like bad Lifetime movies. More interplay between the content of the story and the form of the novel could have resulted in a much better book.