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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1885030266
• ISBN13: 9781885030269
• Release Date: May 1999
• Publisher: Kaya/Muae
• Length: 166 Pages
• Weight: 0.46 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

read this book

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.

A Study in Black and Blue

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.

Roughhouse rubs your nose on the dark underbelly of America

"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!

Father-son fun

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.

An excellent read!

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!