Thaddeus Rutkowski:Roughhouse
- Paperback 2010, ISBN: 9781885030269
Kaya Press. Very Good. 178mm / 127mm. Paperback. 1999. "166 pages. <br>Roughhouse gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence and deviant sex that conne… More...
Kaya Press. Very Good. 178mm / 127mm. Paperback. 1999. "166 pages. <br>Roughhouse gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence and deviant sex that connect a surre al, semi-rural childhood with adult urban neurosis. Terse flashes of narrative, told from the point of view of a troubled youth, p rovide a stark sketch of an American family on the brink: a gun-t oting father prone to inexplicable rages; a mother who speaks in ineffectual, half-remembered Chinese homilies; siblings rendered almost mute from excessive bleakness. And there's the narrator hi mself, who responds to the torment of home and neighborhood bulli es with increasingly aberrant behavior, including sexual bondage and a form of pyromania that requires placing a paper bag over on e's head and igniting it. In spare, unrelenting prose that has be en honed to a point, Rutkowski ferrets out the hard bone of absur dity at the center of emotional displacement. Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in New York. His w ork has been published in numerous publications, including Fictio n magazine and The New York Times. He is a winner of the Nuyorica n Poets Café's Poetry Slam. ""[Rutkowski's] sulfuric tale of fam ily breakdown and fetishism chronicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood even as it criticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity.""? Publishers Weekly ""Rutkowsk i gives us a novel in bites and slices: sharp, shocking, and cert ainly not for the faint-hearted. Here is gall with gusto, a voice of reckoning, and writing to be reckoned with."" ? Molly Peacock Editorial Reviews From Publishers Weekly In clipped, minimalis t sentences whose bareness functions as a foil to the shocking in formation each contains, Rutkowski's narrator, also named Thaddeu s, offers up his life in autobiographic, confessional detail. His fatherAa half-mad, violent Eastern European artistAwaves around a deer rifle and talks about becoming a sniper, between cigarette s, beers, bouts of abusiveness and unpredictable mercy. His Chine se mother is subservient, and much-suffering; she buffers herself from the dysfunctional family by quoting Buddhist wisdom, out of context and badly translated. The narrator's sister runs away fr om home at 14 to escape her father's incestuous sex play. Endurin g the ethnic taunts of neighborhood kids who engage in games of t orture and sadism, the narrator turns his rage and neurotic guilt inward: he pours hot melted wax on his skin and puts paper bags over his head and sets them on fire. The novel's second half, in which the narrator escapes from his family, goes to college and m oves to New York City, plunges him into sex, drugs and sadomasoch istic bondage. This part of the book is as undernourishing as the empty life it describes. Rutkowski (Journey to the Center of My Id), poet and story writer, laces his in-your-face punk realism w ith touches of the surreal and subversive black humor. Sex is emo tional karate, social intercourse is toxic and conversation consi sts mostly of people talking past one another. His sulfuric tale of family breakdown and fetishism chronicles the confusion and op acity of traumatic childhood even as it criticizes the American s ociety that tolerates such inhumanity. 3000 first printing. (May) FYI: Rutkowski, a regular performer on New York's reading circui t, won the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe's Poetry Slam. Copyright 1999 Re ed Business Information, Inc. Review My favorite moment was a cr afted jewel, as tight and nuanced a 123-word story as you're like ly to find anywhere. -- Nerve magazine, Dec. 6, 1999 Rutkowski c ombines carefully measured statements with a profound searching o f the cultural landscape, refusing to accept literary prototypes. -- American Book Review, March-April 2000 Rutkowski's tale chro nicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood as it cri ticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity. -- P ublishers Weekly, April 5, 1999 From the Publisher Roughhouse, T haddeus Rutkowski's novel in short vignettes, gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence, and deviant sex lacing together a surreal, semi-rural childhood with adult urban neurosis. Terse flashes of narrative, told from the point of view of a troubled youth, provide a stark schematic for the American family--a gun-toting father prone to inexplicable rages against a rt and offspring, a mother whose invocation of half-remembered Ch inese homilies breeds its own brand of inarticulation, siblings r endered almost mute from the trauma of excessive environmental an d emotional bleakness.... In a spare, flat and unrelenting prose that has been honed to a point, Rutkowski ferrets out the hard bo ne of absurdity and humor at the center of emotional displacement . About the Author Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsyl vania and lives in Manhattan with his wife and daughter. The auth or of the novels HAYWIRE (Starcherone Books, 2010), ROUGHHOUSE (K aya Press, 1999) and Tetched (Behler Publications, 2005), he teac hes fiction writing at the Writer's Voice of the West Side YMCA i n New York and has taught at Pace University, the Hudson Valley W riters Center and the Asian American Writers Workshop. He has bee n the fiction editor of MANY MOUNTAINS MOVING magazine since 2007 ." ., Kaya Press, 1999, 3<
