Thaddeus Rutkowski

Fiction Writer

TETCHED: A NOVEL IN FRACTALS

        Thaddeus Rutkowski's experimental second novel, Tetched: A Novel in Fractals, provoked a telling remark from a writer friend suffering from creative blockage. After reading a few of the novel's—fractals— chapters composed of several paragraph-sized vignettes" he said in a puzzled, awed tone, "This is just like my journal but it works as a book." True, Tetched reads like journal entries written in the thick of things (not, as in most journal-style books, which are written obviously after the fact, with the luxury of having processed and judged the reported events). But don't let Tetched's fits-and-starts fragments fool you. Rutkowski's novel has the depth and complexity required to engage the reader utterly in a seamless, forward-moving narrative.
        Fractals are, after all, repeating geometric forms that have complex and often changing shapes, such as clouds. Or dysfunctional families. Rutkowski successfully navigates his narrator's strange childhood by using 38 literary fractals, each of which is evocatively titled ("Woman With Breast," "Peculiar Needs") and could stand alone as a flash fiction or a one-act play. His paragraphs are written like film script scenes, with implied fade-in and fade-out, which are in turn composed of sentences that are tiny, no-frills portraits "Her former boyfriend stared at the marks and said,'My God!'".
        The novel's quirky title is key to both its structure and subjects. This spare, edgy bildungsroman opens with a dictionary definition of the adjective it takes as its title: "somewhat unbalanced mentally; touched." With an alcoholic, ex-military, failed-artist, stay-at-home father prone to anger and occasional demands for push-ups so that his oldest son won't turn into a "sissy," and a Confucian Chinese breadwinner mother given to sudden, inexplicable commands like tasting one's own urine ("This is Eastern urology!") the narrator— who is not even named until the 33rd chapter— has a lot of trouble fitting into the world. His gym teacher calls him Mouse; his father advises him to marry an Asian woman or "wring your hands and become a fairy"; his little sister says she always thought she'd grow up to marry a man who looked like him, until she realized that no man does. If the narrator is "touched," it's because nobody —save for the boy he plays "primary care physician" with or the neighbor kid who uses a failed shop class project to administer shock treatment— touches him at all as a child.
        Nonetheless, as we all eventually do, the narrator finds himself grown up: in college, hitching across the country, then living in the city and trying to be a writer. He seeks physical and emotional connection through the most desperate, forceful means: sadomasochism. In darkly comic prose reminiscent of Lorrie Moore and reporting so full of factual detail it's almost literary by default "I was sure that this person and I could build something together. We could interface in a torturous environment", Rutkowski's narrator tries to "get ropey" with several women and discovers how "tetched" he really is. Alone more than "hitched," he realizes absence is as devastating a loss as forfeiture.
        Yet there are moments of hilarity and beauty throughout the book, bright glimmers of the underside of bleak despair. At an artists' colony, a composer who "liked to vacuum objects with his mouth" advises the narrator, "Learn to play a bubble blower, or a rubber hose." Finally, after years alone, a woman who can match wits with him locks her arms around his neck and says, "Now you're stuck with me." When he tells her, "Please don't give me any static," she answers, "Cling! I'll give you static cling." In the end, their child lights up so much from her father's joking that she grins and covers her eyes every time he asks her, "What's happening?"
        Rutkowski, who shares his narrator's biracial heritage, has taught at the Writer's Voice of the West Side YMCA, the Hudson Valley Writer's Center and Pace University. His first novel, Roughhouse, was a finalist for an Asian American Literary Award. The message of Tetched, he recently told interviewer Mickey Z., "is obvious, though it isn't simple. I'm saying, among other things, that behavior patterns don't go away quickly, so you best think hard before you go setting patterns."

—Susan Piperato, Chronogram: Arts, Culture, Spirit (Kingston, N.Y.), December 2005

ROUGHHOUSE: A NOVEL IN SNAPSHOTS

        In clipped, minimalist sentences whose bareness functions as a foil to the shocking information each contains, Rutkowski's narrator offers up his life in autobiographic, confessional detail. His father —a half-mad, violent Eastern European artist —waves around a deer rifle and talks about becoming a sniper, between cigarettes, beers, bouts of abusiveness and unpredictable mercy. His Chinese mother is subservient, and much-suffering; she buffers herself from the dysfunctional family by quoting Buddhist wisdom, out of context and badly translated. The narrator's sister runs away from home at 14 to escape her father's incestuous sex play. Enduring the ethnic taunts of neighborhood kids who engage in games of torture and sadism, the narrator turns his rage and neurotic guilt inward: He pours hot melted wax on his skin and puts paper bags over his head and sets them on fire.
        The novel's second half, in which the narrator escapes from his family, goes to college and moves to New York City, plunges him into drugs and kinky sex. Rutkowski, poet and story writer, laces his in-your-face punk realism with touches of the surreal and subversive black humor. Sex is emotional karate, social intercourse is toxic, and conversation consists mostly of people talking past one another. His 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.

3,000 first printing (May).
Rutkowski, a regular performer on New York's reading circuit, won the Nuyorican Poetry Cafe's Friday poetry slam one time.
Publishers Weekly, April 5, 1999