Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff

Bad Monkeys is probably not the novel for me that it was for Matt Ruff. For me, Bad Monkeys was a "Turn of the Screw"-style story in which the reader wasn't sure if Jane Charlotte's story was completely, literally true or if she was simply insane. I thought Ruff was maintaining that tension, but the last chapter goes off in a completely different direction, so I now have to assume that was never his intent.

Who is Jane Charlotte, you ask? Well, she's being interrogated by a psychiatrist in a white room attached to a prison mental hospital in Nevada, after having murdered at least one person. She claims to be an operative for a gigantic, super-secret operation, which is itself unnamed but has divisions with "clever" codenames. Jane herself was one of the Bad Monkeys, an agent of the division that terminates people who don't deserve to live.

Jane tells the story of her life in several long chapters, separated by shorter "white room" chapters, in which she talks directly to the psychiatrist (who can rebut some of her assertions). She first came into contact with the Bad Monkeys during her mis-spent adolescence, when she met a man she thought was a serial killer. Her story is unlikely at best, unbelievable at worst, and the psychiatrist points out good reasons to believe she's misremembering, delusional, or lying.

This secret organization has abilities that are, frankly, unbelieveable -- they can keep the entire world under surveilance all of the time, get in and out of any location without leaving a trace, fabricate any evidence for or against anything almost immediately. In other words, they sound precisely like the kind of thing a paranoid schizophrenic would dream up to explain her actions. And, as long as that tension persists, Bad Monkeys is a gripping novel. I thought the powers of this secret organization became really too much to believe in a contemporary setting, but, in general, I was along for the ride, and enjoying it.

But the last chapter collapses that tension in a way I couldn't quite believe. Worse, Bad Monkeys kept reminding me of Stewart O'Nan's mesmerizing, horrifying novel The Speed Queen, about another young murderess explaining her actions via first-person narration. It's never fair to compare books that have such different aims -- Speed Queen is deadly serious; Bad Monkeys a modern version of a PhilDickian reality freakout -- but the two books resonate strongly in my head, and not to Bad Monkeys's benefit.

There's nothing at all wrong with Bad Monkeys -- it does what it sets out to do stylishly and with energy to spare -- but it's a cartoonish book that occasionally dabbles in the sources of evil. And as long there are magnificent books about evil, like The Speed Queen, out there, Bad Monkeys will seem minor and trivial by comparison.