Roughhouse: A Novel in Snapshots

Roughhouse, Thaddeus Rutkowski's first book, gives a harrowingly deadpan account of the tedium, casual violence, and deviant sex lacing together 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 schematic for the American family in rot - a gun-toting father prone to inexplicable rages against art and offspring, a mother whose invocation of half-remembered Chinese homilies breeds its own brand of inarticulation, siblings rendered almost mute from the trauma of excessive environmental and emotional bleakness. And then there's the narrator himself, who responds to the torment of bullying neighborhood kids and an unstable home life with increasingly aberrant behavior, including sexual bondage and a form of pyromania that requires placing a paper bag over one's head and lighting it on fire. The passage into adulthood transforms these preoccupations into fetish, with its attendant disruption of relationships. Rutkowski ferrets out the hard bone of absurdity at the center of emotional displacement.