Haywire

by Thaddeus Rutkowski

Fiction. Asian American Studies. Thaddeus Rutkowski's deadpan, darkly funny third novel is comprised of 49 unsentimental stories narrated by the son of a Polish-American artist father and a Chinese-American mother. A bildungsroman with unexpected twists, the narrative spirals out from the insular life of a biracial teenager into a surrealistic, giddy page-turner once the narrator's obsessive fetishism begins to develop, and the reader is pulled along by the nose ring through a heady combination of literary and voyeuristic appeal. Our narrator eventually learns to get along with, even love, the people around him, but the feeling doesn't come easily. John Barth has called Rutkowski's work "tough and funny and touching and harrowing," and Alison Lurie has said that "Rutkowski is one of the most original writers in America today. Once you've read his low-key, continually surprising fiction, the world will look different to you--maybe just for an hour, maybe forever."

Genres: Fiction

248 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2010

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

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

WHAT WE HAD IN COMMON

We grew up at different times and in different places, but we had some things in common.
Each of us had a parent who had a lot to say, and much of what that parent said was negative.
Our parents performed tests and drills on us, as if to establish a sort of mind control.
We rebelled in our own ways. Our personal rebellions were noticed but not greeted warmly.
We moved away from childhood homes as soon as we could.
We gained job experience by working in restaurants -- washing dishes, busing tables, taking orders, and carrying plates. We didn't make much money that way.
We traveled long distances to visit people we thought were our soul mates. But when we saw them, we found they were not really in tune with our souls.
We had siblings who, as adults, didn't speak much to us. We were, of course, partly to blame.
We furthered our careers by working for magazines that covered industries like office-furniture manufacturing and below-the-line marketing.
We had problems submitting to authority. Of course, we had no authority of our own.
We lived downtown because we liked the streets -- the people on the streets -- and couldn't afford to live uptown anyway.
We lived in apartments that were tiny, but not very tiny.
The night we met, we stayed up late talking, but we didn't go home together.
The second night we met, we went home together.
We noticed that she had a small red mark on her cheek -- maybe it was temporary, maybe not.
We decided that "Sympathy for the Devil" would be our theme song. We liked the way the music moved forward, as if accompanying a fast mode of transportation -- a train.
We thought that dangerous sex was good sex; we even welcomed the idea of "strapping something on".
We liked the album Fresh Fruit in Foreign Places, by Kid Creole and the Coconuts.
We were both about the same height, without shoes. Sometimes, we put on cowboy and/or combat boots to gain elevation.
We knew I was biracial, but we disagreed on whether I was bisexual.
Basically, we were metrosexual.
We thought that race mattered, even though we understood that, in many circles, race was finished as an issue.
We befriended people who followed their creative impulses without the promise of financial reward.
Sometimes, we found garbage on our fire escape: beer bottles, corn cobs. Our next-door neighbor told us that someone had come through her open windown and stole a pair of Roller Blades.
We were obsessive/compulsive in our behavior, but our pathologies were different.
We decided to interrupt our patterns by tackling one pile of objects or activities at a time.
Our efforts were not always steady. We went forward, then back, then forward again.
We tried to keep in touch with our former partners, but we were not always successful in doing so.
After a time, we came to understand our parents in a different way. We no longer thought they were crazy.
We were not immune to depression.
We agreed that guilt was not necessary.

[Jim Feast]

I just finished the Ann Beattie's Burning House. Interesting book though she always seems to be straining at things that, in a recent read, Rutkowki's Haywire, the author did effortlessly. I finally figured it out. She always has her characters do oddball things, such as going under an ex-husband's window to read him from Hamlet, but they never seem all that funny. That's because she rigidly polices what she allows. That is she would never deal with, say, sex fetishism, fights with landlords, racism. These things Rutkowski takes up, which gives the comedy a biting edge which she never attains. Timidity is her downfall as a writer and probably also what makes her attractive to many timid readers. Only bold readers pick up Haywire.

[Jacob Russell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review from uncorrected proofs
Starcherone Books
Buffalo, NY

"Composed of 49 flash stories narrated by the son of a Polish-American artist father and a Chinese mother"

Part 1
IN CARS

"My brother and sister and I were riding in the car while our father drove. "

Our Father...

Who drives the fragments of narrative in Rutkowski's coming of age novel, drives them like nails into the narrator's textual consciousness.

Our Father ...

Who gives incomprehensible orders out of which compulsive sexual fetishes naturally follow--natural, that is, in that they share with the Father a robust textual force while remaining themselves, opaque, inexplicable--habits acquired or inherited or inflicted, whose beginnings are sometimes noted, but whose psychic genesis is neither explored nor revealed. Yet in the aporia of the perpetually absent presence of the Father we find their hidden coordinates precisely in that state of being hidden, the unwritten text which, in another novel, a different kind of narrative, might offer clues of motive, offer possible explanations for the symptoms, for what becomes of the fetishes of sexual bondage (the dominate features of the middle sections of the book) after the narrator's marriage and the birth of his daughter. They seem to have been tied and left dangling heels over head, bent like question marks without answers.

Rutkowski likes to employ non sequiturs to move the reader forward, as in the following example. The narrator has rather confused, but persistent writerly ambitions. He attends a residential workshop or writer's retreat. He amuses himself burning pages of his bad writing. ".. I couldn't incinerate the pages in my room," he says, "So I took my embarrassing printouts down the road to a clearing, put them on the ground and touched a lit match to them. While I was burning my papers, a resident writer happened to walk by. He must have seen the smoke, but he didn’t' ask about it. All he said was, 'This road we're on in a good route for biking."

This is an effective device. Things are always just 'happening' like this. It's how his father works in the opening chapters. Keep in mind, a child doesn't experience a parent's actions as random--inexplicable, yes, but not random. The meaning must be there. Somewhere. Everything in a child's world (as in our dreams) is overdetermined. Overdetermined and utterly mysterious. I found this a strong point in Rutkowski's style. He withholds interpretation. That takes admirable disciple. Dream-like sequences are interwoven at several points in the memory narratives, also without explanation, and with no bridge, no passages of transition. The associative power of the negation is a real power, far more than any explanation, no matter how canny, how wise. We are left with a chimera of unread, and unreadable possibilities hovering over... or under, the text.

He suffers from schoolyard bullies and bigots, who single him out for his Asian features. His mother--her character, her image--is left largely undeveloped--but the roughest sketch. This is true of all the characters. We have brief encounters--the stoner brother, some of the narrator's early lovers, but only the father rises out of the text, and then--as a kind of ghost memory who he fumbles to make real for his daughter when she asks what he was like--long after his death. Fumbles and fails... summoning no story, no incident (though the first third of the book is filled with incidents that might do--but how could he? How could he impose this Father on her... whose hope resides in being free of him?) Does he realize that in declining the challenge, he is risking doing exactly that? ... by conjuring the mystery? The undeciphered parental text that is the source of all ghosts?

Haywire is written in three main parts, each consisting of short, titled chapters, some of which might stand alone as independent fragments. The prose is spare and functional, well suited to the dream-like accounts of memory and exposition. I wonder if it might gain in power by further condensation. It seemed a bit long at almost 300 pages, but I was not unhappy at having read it. While a reviewer might easily point out imperfections, I see no reason to do so, as they are of a kind that go hand in hand with testing out certain limits. What Rutkowski has attemped here is worth the risks he took. May this lead to more, and still more accomplished work in the future.

[Vincent · Rating 4 out of 5]

In addition to having read is two prior books, I have had the pleasure of listening to him read from his works live and to speak to him about juggling work, family, and art. He regularly facilitates creative writing workshops in New York City. One day, I will find the time to take one. A longer review of his book is posted on my blog: http://cranialgunk.com/blog/2011/11/1...

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Strange, raw, and confessional, "Haywire" reminds me of Thad Rutkowski's more cohesive subsequent novel of short fictions, "Safe Colors." The plot follows a similar trajectory; the chapters are self-contained, with some -- like one about aliens, and another about traversing a bridge cable like a tightwire -- acting like the literary equivalents of the involuntary digressions we make when we tell a story before we set it "right." What's on that right track? For Rutkowski, the "normal" tilts: the dangerous dad, the overworked mom, the pointless jobs, the failed intimacies, the dissociative explorations of S&M... It's not quite Dennis Cooper territory at its kinkiest but it veers in that direction until Rutkowski finds himself suddenly a family man with a daughter, a wife, and maybe a steady job too. He's still the outsider looking at his life from a distance. But a self-deprecatory amusement crawls into the pages. Free (as much as one can be) of the nuclear family in which he was raised, Rutkowski's stand-in forms a new family unit that gives him space to accept the inherent/inherited weirdness which inhabits many of us. Now what happens next in the afterwor(l)d?

[Meg Tuite · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review to come