Roughhouse

by Thaddeus Rutkowski

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 Café’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

166 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Thaddeus Rutkowski is the author of the novels Haywire, Tetched and Roughhouse. Haywire reached No. 1 on Small Press Distribution’s fiction best-seller list. All three books were finalists for an Asian American Literary Award. He teaches at Medgar Evers College and at the Writer’s Voice of the West Side YMCA in New York. His writing has appeared in The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, The New York Times, The International Herald Tribune, Fiction and Fiction International. He received a 2012 fiction writing fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Reviews

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Fantastic! An amazing novel that exists in a state somewhere between SLAM poetry and flash fiction. Reading this is like flipping channels through a disturbed life."

[Gay Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thad's books give me nightmares--in a good way. Love the sparseness of his writing.

[Joanna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like that the style and content of this book make the reader uncomfortable. It was an interesting read.

[Nicholas Binge · Rating 3 out of 5]

An odd book. Some very interesting moments and nice ideas. I read it quickly and liked the end, but much of it felt unconnected and lacking in narrative. I think that was the point, but it didn't work for me as a reader especially well.