Customer Reviews

Roughhouse

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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.

"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!

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.

Thad writes in sharp, painful little bites that will gnaw at your heart and make you laugh simultaneously. Reading Roughhouse is like stepping into a dysfunctional family's internal poetry/prose slam-with the narrator taking first place. Great reading!

rutkowski is hard edged and deeply moving, simultaneously. it's imposssible not to identify with the troubled young man he creates. He's also riotously funny.

Thaddeus Rutkowski writes concise, powerful , and funny prose about a rural childhood. His artist father rages and points guns at his children, while his Chinese mother lives in denial and nourishes her plants with plasma from the local hospital where she works. The half-Asian protagonist is tortured by the local Germanic population, and finds solace in nature. Moving and witty, it is a novel of surviving harsh beginnings.

I've known Thaddeus Rutkowski since he was bringing in early chapters of this novel to a writing workshop. They were powerful then, and put together as a novel, they make a short, sharp shock of a book.

The voice is especially strong, at first seeming like an expressionless monotone,the pressure builds through the arc of the book, until the tragedy and hilarity of the narrator's family takes on huge dimensions.

Also...if you ever get a chance to hear him read his own work, DEFINITELY go. He's a marvelous reader/speaker.

"My neighbor initiated me to the boys' club by tying me to the chair..." Thaddeus Rutkowski's ROUGHHOUSE begins with some indelible depictions of childhood traumas both inside and outside the narrator's turbulent family home. And it ends in the sex shops and bedrooms of New York City, where, depending on the visitor, sometimes a mattress cord is just a cord used for tying up a mattress. The story is served up in easily digestible, bite-size jewels, which each shine and cut in their own distinct ways. Strung together, they create a more complete, more complex mosaic--an intimate look at the way experiences, observations and perceptions can resonate through a lifetime, always finding new ways to trap or liberate us.

Yes, I swoon at every word this book elevates into the heavens. I have not been this moved since Bellow and Singer, Nabokov and Miller. Mr. Rutkowski is the best writer to grace this new century. This book will change your life!