Category: Publications

From 1998:

Matt Ruff’s first novel, Fool on the Hill, written when he was just 23, has recently been reissued in paperback, no doubt to satisfy readers such as myself who upon finishing Sewer, Gas and Electric rushed out to their local bookstore to get more of this guy. While the earlier novel is not quite as polished or as funny as Sewer, Gas and Electric, it’s still a trip worth taking.

I’m told that Fool on the Hill is something of a cult classic among college students, and it’s not hard to figure out why. Ruff ponders the BIG ISSUES — i.e. the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life and love — in an accessible, light-hearted way that undergraduates with pretensions of being hip will gladly prefer over Moby Dick. It’s particularly relevant to student nerds because it takes place on a college campus — Cornell — with a plot that pits social misfits against dumb frat guys and various other meanies in a battle of good over evil (guess who wins). In my own college days, you were cool if you read Vonnegut; I don’t know what this says about the zeitgeist of the upcoming generation, but Ruff is a better, more optimistic writer with a finer sense of narrative.

English majors will have a field day with the explicit symbolism in this book, which is both a source of its amusement and annoyance. Cornell is located in Ithaca, NY, a reference of course to the fabled home of Odysseus, so, not surprisingly, several journeys take place. As in Sewer, Gas and Electric, there are a variety of seemingly disparate characters who come together in a potentially catastrophic clash that turns out all right in the end. These include the Bohemians (a loose affiliation of graduating seniors who more than live up their namesake), sprites (as in little invisible fairies, but lacking wings and therefore having to rely upon model airplanes and boats to get about), and dogs and cats (who communicate telepathically). The Fool is the adult figure, a Cornell writer-in-residence (and maybe Ruff’s alter ego?) named Stephen Titus George. Give yourself extra points if you’ve derived “St. George” from the character’s initials and that you might expect a battle with a dragon (in fact there are two). Then there are the loves of George’s life, Calliope (the Greek Muse of poetry) and Aurora Borealis Smith (a student going out with a pompous fundamentalist Christian who becomes George’s guiding light). The plot hinges on the opening of a Pandora’s Box, unleashing the evil Rasferret to seek revenge against the sprites who imprisoned him. This rodent creature (which you might suspect is an allusion to the rat bad guys of Redwall, except the novel was originally published at about the same time as Brian Jacques’s first book in the series) is also capable of animating mannequins and tractor trailers to wreak havoc upon the humans, culminating in the final duel on the Hill. Whew!

Presiding over the fates of this improbable collection is Mr. Sunshine, some sort of Greek god who metaphysically outlines, without ever fully writing out the details, how their respective stories will unfold. Aha, you say! A theological proposition that humanity has free will to act in a universe in which God sets the parameters, but not the specifics, thus allowing for the existence of evil. And, at the same time, a meta-fictional reference to the omniscient narrator and the art of storytelling. A bit obvious, isn’t it? And what’s the significance of calling this character “Mr. Sunshine”? That everything turns out all right in the end? Sounds a bit lame to me.

Indeed, while Ruff manages to hammer all these implausible materials into an engaging plot structure, at times the workmanship isn’t always first-rate. For example, several of his sprites have Shakespearean names. But what’s the point? Hamlet has nothing in common with his namesake except that it provides for a chapter called “Hamlet Sees a Ghost.” Similarly, Laertes has a sister who dies, but this time she is murdered, and there’s no subsequent revenge scene. As for Puck, the hero sprite, I don’t see what he has in common with the Robin Goodfellow of Midsummer’s Night Dream.

Ruff seems to know this, as he provides an explanation of these sophomoric literary references in a scene where Aurora asks George why she is telling him about the novelist/songwriter and former Cornell student Richard Fariña:

“So how is [Fariña] possibly relevant to our situation?” 
“Well, it isn’t,” George said…”But it’s bad luck to pass up any chance at a literary reference.”

That said, there are some wonderful pieces for the literary in-crowd, a cult book in praise of other cult authors. My favorite is the showdown between the police and a doctoral physics student who seems to be threatening to blow himself up:

“…[W]hat’s that thing you’re holding?” 
“…It’s a lightning rod.” He shook the satchel. “I’m a seller of lightning rods.” 
“Oh, Je-sus,” cried the police psychologist. “He’s read Bradbury! I hate it when they’ve read Bradbury!”

There’s also a mysterious fraternity called the Tolkien House, which quite literally recreates Middle-Earth. Here I have to agree with Ruff when he says in his author’s note that, “…it might be nice to find a real Tolkien House out there somewhere.”

While Sewer, Gas and Electric has the trappings of an SF novel, though the science fictional devices are incidental, Fool on the Hill is pure fantasy. It’s also not as accomplished, so if you’ve never read Ruff, I’d recommend starting with the second book. But definitely check out the earlier work.

It will be real interesting to see how Ruff further matures in his next work; unfortunately, taking two years to write the first and four to complete the second, the wait might be long. But I suspect it will be well worth it.

I started reviewing SF and Fantasy Books at the now defunct (alas) Sf Site. Since I own the copyright, I’m going to start reprinting them here. The first of these, The Life of God (as Told by Himself by Franco Ferrucci appeared in the Internet Paleolithic Age of 1998.

BTW: I’ve always been fond of the em dash (here typographically represented by — ) — it pisses me off immensely that the use of em dashes is a tell tale for AI. I can assure you this, was not AI generated. Back in the 1990s, AI was still just a science fictional wet dream.

In Ray Bradbury’s short story, “The Man,” a space traveler lands on a planet only hours after God had apparently visited, then sets off to other worlds in a vain attempt to catch up to Him, destined to always arrive too late. It’s an apt metaphor for humanity’s inherent inability to grasp the ineffability of God, despite our determined best efforts. But from the time of Job, this hasn’t stopped authors from writing stories that try to figure out just what He was thinking of in creating us poor mortals. And why He hasn’t done a better job in handling things since.

SF and fantasy, in particular, have obsessed about the nature of godhood. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, while generally thought of as a prescient warning about unthinking technological advancement at the dawn of the Industrial Age — and hence one of the first works of science fiction — is also a theological meditation on the Creator’s seeming uncaring relationship to the created, as the novel’s epigraph from Milton’s Paradise Lost makes clear:

Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay
To mould me Man, did I solicit thee
From darkness to promote me?

Not surprisingly, considering the source, stories about God are usually told from humanity’s perspective. While James Morrow may introduce the deceased body of God in Towing Jehovah and Blameless in Abbadon to prompt further turmoil and dissension among mankind about God and His intentions, God doesn’t get to tell His side of it straight out. However, as the title indicates, this is precisely the conceit of Franco Ferrucci’s The Life of God (as Told by Himself). Here God is a “He” not in the traditional sense of being a Father to humanity, but rather as a creature of sexual desires, most notably in impregnating the mother of Jesus.

As you might expect, then, Ferrucci walks a fine line between clever satire and the sophomoric. For instance, when God attends the Last Supper and remarks, “The entire scene was like a stupendously inventive painting,” at the same time you are laughing it might also strike you as a cheap, easy joke.

Ferrucci depicts a God who is as clueless as to the nature of creation and the meaning of it all as are you and I. He wishes He could make things better, but, particularly as He gets older (and the fact that God is a maturing being is crucial to the novel’s premise), He comes to realize the futility of trying to overcome His own limitations. Yes, the reason the universe is imperfect is because God is imperfect. But don’t blame Him for the trouble in the world, or the vain uses of His name. It’s people who’ve come up with the wars and fables that totally miss the point about Him. It’s people who are screwing up. He’s just a blameless observer.

In the course of His “life,” God communicates with the people you might expect: Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Dante, Freud, Einstein. But this God is no burning bush; He is an entity who assumes corporeal form. Which means that God also dies, although in the Hindu sense of continual reincarnation over the centuries, often without consciously choosing who He’ll be in the next life. In considering what happens to mere people when they die, God has no idea. So much for the rewards of Heaven. Or the punishments of Hell, for that matter.

Don’t be put off by the fact that Ferrucci is a Rutgers professor or that this was originally written in Italian. Even though it is a University of Chicago imprint, this is not some convoluted dry academic “high lit” tome. While the paperback reissue of this book is not marketed as science fiction or fantasy, it is certainly in the Morrow tradition — funny, wise, and, for the most part, right on the money in considering the ontological problems raised by the notion of God.

After you’ve read God’s fictional autobiography, you might want to pick up his non-fictional biography. In describing God’s changing identity as it develops through the historical/literary recounting in the Old Testament, God: A Biography by Jack Miles views God in a way that in many respects parallels Ferrucci’s, in particular as an evolving entity who eventually decides to remove Himself altogether from his creation.

Highly recommended.