Matt Ruff

Likes to rough up our fragile sense of order

One of the best Seattle authors you may never have heard of is novelist Matt Ruff, as wildly rambunctious on the page as he is mild and rational in his Queen Anne Hill home.

His first published novel, "Fool on the Hill," populates the contemporary Cornell University campus with a Greek god, dragon, elves and a deadly mannequin called the Rubbermaid. It's become a cult favorite with college students.

His second, "Sewer, Gas & Electric," is a takeoff on "Atlas Shrugged" in which the resurrected Ayn Rand is trapped in a hurricane lamp while the Tower of Babble is being reconstructed.

These were warm-ups for the award-winning "Set This House in Order." Set locally between Poulsbo and "Autumn Creek," a town loosely inspired by King County's Fall City, it features the world's most complicated love story: two people with multiple-personality disorder brought on by childhood trauma, each flickering with characters who struggle for their minds.

"House" was so complex to erect that it could easily have collapsed. Instead, this tour de force becomes mesmerizing as it upsets all our notions of self-identity. Ruff has heard from psychiatrists and their patients, and, "The consensus was that I did as good a job as could be done conveying what it's like, without being a multiple myself." Queen Anne Books, which has adopted Ruff, has sold hundreds of copies.

Ruff, 40, was raised in New York — he had Frank McCourt of "Angela's Ashes" fame as a teacher — and is the son of a Lutheran minister, who was a hospital chaplain, and a Brazilian-born missionary mother. He knew he wanted to be a writer by age 5, and wrote a novel (never published) in high school.

He writes fiction full-time with the support of his wife, Lisa Gold, a rare-book dealer whom he met in college but didn't realize he needed to marry until after a decade or so of friendship. Ruff's books take time, too, typically three to five years of careful rewriting. Now he's finishing "Bad Monkeys," about a murderess who claims she's really part of a do-gooder assassination society.

Why did the author's kaleidoscopic imagination come to rest in Seattle after a dozen cities? The couple "fell hard" for the city on vacation several years ago. ("You can walk here without being mugged!")

"Seattle is this great combination of city and small town," Ruff says. Just the place to put his house in order.