Thad Rutkowski
Haywire
Starcheone Books, 2010
http://www.starcherone.com/thad.html


In 2006 a colleague of mine suggested I go to see a poet who was reading at a garden in New York’s East Village. While there I had the fortune of seeing Thad Rutkowski read from his work and I have been following him ever since.
Rutkowski’s writing evokes a sense of longing and dry wistfulness that draws me to his writing over and over again. Haywire, his current novel, presents a fictionalized biracial teenager who navigates a complicated family and social terrain. Using lean deadpan prose, Rutkowski briskly moves the reader along in tightly constructed vignettes that surprise, entertain and disturb.
A powerful example of entertaining disturbance is in the vignette titled “In Cars.” The boy next door invites the narrator to his clubhouse. After being provided with an easy password and given a nickname, the narrator is told that he must pass an admission test. His hands and feet are tied with telephone wire. The neighbor unbuckles the narrator’s pants saying, “If you ever get caught by our enemies, they may de-pants you, like this. When that happens, you have to know what to do.” Then an adult voice calls out and after reading for a while the neighbor releases the narrator and this portion of the vignette melts away.
We follow the narrator through the tension in the household and glimpse the father’s dark temper, somewhat sexualized fixation on the daughter, and ultimately his death. There’s really no overt sentimentality here and when the second part begins the narrator has moved on to college and the vignettes depict a shift from adolescence to a more mature adolescence. Thus we see college angst, sexual fetish awareness and experimentation, drug use and an indirect search for meaningful connection.
One of the strengths of this book is the humor, which is interwoven sometimes as irony, sometimes is very direct and sometimes just catches the reader off guard. There is an exquisite vignette in which he and his college roommate begin to grow a marijuana plant and they set the apartment on fire. As they and the others are evacuated from the premises, his roommate explains, “We were cooking, preparing a feast, and things got out of hand.” Yes, a delicious herbal feast.
The novel seems to speed up after that episode and we voyeuristically enter the vignettes that present the narrator’s search for ropes, string, harnesses, binding, that is, his fetish voice matures.
“I didn’t ask my guest about protection from HIV or other STDs. I didn’t take responsibility. Basically, I acted recklessly.” This brief laconic statement illuminates a cold hard truth of youth and the hunting down of experience. This is why Rutkowski’s writing calls me back repeatedly. There are no apologies or grand evasive gestures. Nestled throughout the text are honest yet fractured conversations among the siblings.
The narrator engages with his psyche as he tries to be in the world. There are absurdities, love, fear, racism, sex, growth, marriage, child rearing and wonder.
“All I wanted was some affection, a leg over mine while I slept, a kiss. I got both, which was fine, and the kiss, with a tongue that was tentative, almost hidden.” And this is what Thad Rutkowski does so well, writing stories within a story using language that not only entertains but also draws out what is often hidden, sometimes painful and always thought provoking.


Rita Stein
December 2010