Roughhouse [Paperback]

Thaddeus Rutkowski (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2, 1999

Roughhouse gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence and deviant sex that connect 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 sketch of an American family on the brink: a gun-toting 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 himself, who responds to the torment of home and neighborhood bullies with increasingly aberrant behavior, including sexual bondage and a form of pyromania that requires placing a paper bag over one's head and igniting it. In spare, unrelenting prose that has been honed to a point, Rutkowski ferrets out the hard bone of absurdity at the center of emotional displacement.
Thaddeus Rutkowski grew up in central Pennsylvania and now lives in New York. His work has been published in numerous publications, including Fiction magazine and The New York Times. He is a winner of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe's Poetry Slam.

"[Rutkowski's] sulfuric tale of family breakdown and fetishism chronicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood even as it criticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity."- Publishers Weekly

"Rutkowski gives us a novel in bites and slices: sharp, shocking, and certainly 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, minimalist sentences whose bareness functions as a foil to the shocking information each contains, Rutkowski's narrator, also named Thaddeus, 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 cigarettes, beers, bouts of abusiveness and unpredictable mercy. His Chinese 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 from home at 14 to escape her father's incestuous sex play. Enduring the ethnic taunts of neighborhood kids who engage in games of torture 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 moves to New York City, plunges him into sex, drugs and sadomasochistic 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 with touches of the surreal and subversive black humor. Sex is emotional karate, social intercourse is toxic and conversation consists mostly of people talking past one another. His sulfuric tale of family breakdown and fetishism chronicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood even as it criticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity. 3000 first printing. (May) FYI: Rutkowski, a regular performer on New York's reading circuit, won the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe's Poetry Slam.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

My favorite moment was a crafted jewel, as tight and nuanced a 123-word story as you're likely to find anywhere. -- Nerve magazine, Dec. 6, 1999

Rutkowski combines carefully measured statements with a profound searching of the cultural landscape, refusing to accept literary prototypes. -- American Book Review, March-April 2000

Rutkowski's tale chronicles the confusion and opacity of traumatic childhood as it criticizes the American society that tolerates such inhumanity. -- Publishers Weekly, April 5, 1999

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 108 pages
• Publisher: Kaya/Muae (May 2, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1885030266
• ISBN-13: 978-1885030269
• Product Dimensions: 7 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,290,490 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Study in Black and Blue, November 28, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Roughhouse (Paperback)

There are many bruises here, pain and little healing. At first I was curious about why this book obsessed with the darker side of family relationships, but I realized that this dark side was what the protagonist was forced to see in the light--grief is apparent, not concealed. These sound bytes of reality are like snippets of information, or severed knowledge. How true to life. Overall a challenging and difficult read, because of its subject matter. But rewarding.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Roughhouse rubs your nose on the dark underbelly of America, July 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Roughhouse (Paperback)

"A man's home is his castle." Taken to heart--the wrong heart--the notion can lead to the most grotesque kind of tinpot tyranny, like the one dispassionately described in this brilliant novel of black humor. The narrator's father is a fascinatingly twisted s.o.b. who abuses his family in a myriad of ways. Depicting an apparently semirural lower middle class existence, the book thrives on bizarre convolutions: one of them is that Dad is an Artist. Another: Mom is Chinese. Dad is also a drunken gun-nut who torments his sons and molests his young daughter. The narrator grows up to be an artist, too, or at least an art student. He acts out his own compulsions in what by contrast seems like the much saner and socially acceptable outlet of mutually-consented s & m. A darkly comic masterpiece!

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Father-son fun, July 22, 1999

By 

C. Wierzbicki (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Roughhouse (Paperback)

Rutkowski fondly recollects his boyhood days as a moving target for his father's tortured artist angst. In his past he uncovers horrors but also discovers a curious kind of redemption. This may well turn out to be a classic study of the birth of a conceptual artist.