Ruff, Matt 1965(?)-

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RUFF, Matt 1965(?)-

PERSONAL:

Born c. 1965, in New York, NY; married; wife's name, Lisa. Education: Cornell University, degree in creative writing.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—c/o Author Mail, HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd St., 7th Fl., New York, NY 10022. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer. Has worked variously in a bookstore and as a waiter.

AWARDS, HONORS:

James Tiptree, Jr., Award, 2004, for Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls.

WRITINGS:

Fool on the Hill (novel), Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 1988.

Sewer, Gas, and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy (novel), Atlantic Monthly Press (New York, NY), 1997.

Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls (novel), HarperCollins Publishers (New York, NY), 2003.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Bad Monkeys, a novel.

SIDELIGHTS:

Matt Ruff wrote his first novel, Fool on the Hill, while he was attending Cornell University, and the campus and city of Ithaca, New York figure in the story, which has several threads. Characters include Ezra Cornell, the founder of the school; writer Stephen Titus George (St. George), who competes in storytelling with Mr. Sunshine; Mr. Sunshine, a Greek god (Apollo), who manipulates the lives of people to create "true fictions"; a dog named Luther and a cat named Blackjack, who are in search of paradise; Aurora Borealis Smith, a student Mr. Sunshine chooses to romantically link to George; Calliope, the most beautiful woman in the world and the last of the nine muses; and an army of rats. The campus is populated by knights known as Bohemians and by sprites who glide through the air and fall in love with humans. Of this debut, Jane Dorrell wrote in Books that Ruff "has a tremendous imagination, and his gift as a storyteller matches that of Mr. Sunshine himself. The adventures of his disparate characters keep us turning the pages faster and faster." In reviewing Fool on the Hill for the London Observer, Jan Dalley said that "fans of the psychedelic revival will find a richness in its sheer scale."

Sewer, Gas, and Electric: The Public Works Trilogy, Ruff's next novel, is a political satire set in the year 2023. Billionaire Harry Gant's project, a new Tower of Babel being built in Manhattan by a crew of both human and android steelworkers, is at the halfway point. Gant's former wife, Joan Fine, has been hired to find out who killed a Wall Street financier who had been out to destroy Gant Industries, and who was beaten to death with a copy of Atlas Shrugged. The book's author, Ayn Rand, is brought back from the dead by computer and is captured in a lamp to become Joan's helper. Rand's theory of Objectivism threads its way through a plot that also includes a history of the Walt Disney Company and J. Edgar Hoover's Federal Bureau of Investigation. Other characters include Philo Dufresne, an environmentalist pirate who glides beneath the shipping lanes of the East Coast in a green and pink submarine that was fashioned by Howard Hughes; Philo's daughter, Seraphina, who lives within the walls of the New York Public Library; Lexa Thatcher, a newspaper publisher and pornographer whose Volkswagen Beetle has been taken over by the spirit of Abbey Hoffman; and a mutant great white shark that roams below New York City in the sewer system. "Ruff uses a cartoonist's palette in his portraits of everyone and everything," commented a Publishers Weekly critic about the book.

More recently, Ruff completed Set This House in Order: A Romance of Souls, which was called "a surprisingly dense story that boils down to a journey of self-discovery" by Booklist writer Regina Schroeder. Set in contemporary Seattle, the story features Andy Gage, a soft-spoken man in his mid-twenties whose personality was split apart by an abusive stepfather when he was three years old. His strongest personality or ego, his "father," Aaron, has been in charge of the body since then, controlling the hundreds of "souls," including fifteen-year-old Adam, five-year-old Jake, gentle Aunt Sam, and the violent Gideon, who was banished from the "house." Andrew, who has now been put in charge, has been in existence for only two years. The gentle soul allots time to each of the others, and his landlady, Mrs. Winslow, speaks to each individually and cooks according to their special preferences. "This sort of specificity—funny and tender at once—is part of what drives Set This House in Order by making Andrew both familiar and sympathetic," wrote Gail Caldwell in the Boston Globe. "People tend to want to care for him."

Andrew's friend and employer, Julie Sivik, is an entrepreneur whose Reality Factory creates virtual reality programming. She suspects that Andrew's multiple personalities may give him more insight into the techno-fantasy world than a normal person would be capable of. She also hires another programmer, Penny "Mouse" Driver, who is also a multiple personality but who has less control of her personas, including a barfly, a hardware geek named Thread, and twins Malefica and Maledicta. When Penny's dominant personality reaches out to Andrew his fragility is put in peril. The two, plus all of their personalities, make a cross-country trip to Andrew's home in Michigan, where he plans to face his past head-on; conflicts arise as each tries to take control.

Kerry Fried noted in the New York Times Book Review that in his earlier two books, Ruff "was prodigal with his plots, his human extras, his animal delights. Set This House in Order, though equally irresistible, is a bolder book, an odyssey of transformation and trust rather than a clamorous symphony of a thousand." A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that "though he takes his hero seriously, Ruff offers plenty of comic situations as Andrew tries to interact with the outside world while the other souls kibbitz. Best of all is the endearing Andrew, a truly original protagonist."