Finalist, Asian American Writers Workshop Members' Choice Award May 1999 Fiction Approximately 108 pp Paperback 1-885030-26-6 $10.95 list Roughhouse A novel by Thaddeus Rutkowski Book Description . About the Author . Excerpt . Reviews . Events . Buy Books Now Roughhouse, Thaddeus Rutkowski's novel in short vignettes, 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 both professional and private. In a spare, flat, and unrelenting prose that has been honed to a point, Rutkowski ferrets out the hard bone of absurdity and humor at the center of emotional displacement.