Book Review: Violent Outbursts by Thaddeus Rutkowski

Violent Outbursts
Flash Fiction by Thaddeus Rutkowski
Spuyten Duyvil, August 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1941550588
$16.00; 107 pp.
Reviewed by John Amen
Over the past few years, flash fiction has soared in popularity, perhaps in part as a result of mobile devices becoming the primary reading platform, especially for people in their twenties and early thirties. More than just an expedient form, however, the genre tests a writer’s ability to express essentially and economically and to maximize the elements of fiction within a condensed parameter. With Violent Outbursts, Thaddeus Rutkowski mines the confessional approach, everyday occurrences, and the fantastical, displaying thematic and stylistic range, with most of the pieces in this collection totaling less than five hundred words in length.

“On the Stairs,” the second offering in Violent Outbursts, is a parable on the realities of socialization delivered via a deadpan, even narcotized voice. The piece opens, “There were two sets of stairs in our house.” Then in the next paragraph: “When we moved in, my brother and sister and I discovered that we could run up one set of stairs and down the other in a continuous loop…the motion was all we needed to be happy.” With, perhaps, a tip of the hat to the Winchester Mystery House, Rutkowski evokes a paradisal scene. The unblocked “loop” conjures fluidity, completeness, and the mythic ouroboros; the circle a universal symbol of wholeness, the natural state as so idealized by Romantics the world over.

The third paragraph begins, “Shortly, however, one set of stairs was sealed off, probably by our father. We could no longer run in a continuous loop…. No doubt we ran up and down these stairs repeatedly, laughing, but it wasn’t the same. We couldn’t get really crazy.” The “father” in the piece is both biological sire and the God of the scriptures. The loss of the “loop” is Rutkowski metonymizing First-World socialization, the author’s and his siblings’ untamed instincts systematically curbed, the innocent abandon that existed prior to this ongoing initiation no longer accessible. The piece closes, “But our father was happier,” the energy and behavior of the children tamped so as to be congruent with social, cultural, familial, and religious expectations. With this piece, Rutkowski successfully forges conflict, character developments, and a complete narrative arc, also asserting a descriptive statement on the universality of conditioning—accomplishing these tasks in under three hundred words.

“Working to Pay the Bills” is on one hand a narrator’s diaristic commentary on the stressful nature of his days, presumably in corporate America. On the other hand, it is a complex albeit familiar excoriation of a cycle in which many Americans find themselves ensnared: “If I take my eyes from the screen for an instant…I will be questioned about my lack of attention.” Rutkowski’s tone is reminiscent of Kafka’s K, that now archetypal ditherer who strives to navigate a world to which he yearns to belong but the rules of which he can never grasp. Rutkowski’s closing paragraph highlights the syndromic oppressiveness of debt, how so many are essentially indentured servants, working to pay off money owed, “resentful,” “[making] it through another day.” Again working with a piece in the three hundred-word range, Rutkowski effectively renders both a portrait and caricature of the American work environment and the exhausted employee, stressing the emotional distance between subordinate and supervisor, how the necessity of generating income and navigating the realities of capitalism can have toxic effects, fostering depression and dissociative tendencies.

Rutkowski is probably indebted, at least indirectly, to Kobo Abe and Haruki Murakami (two of the primary heirs to Kafka’s brand of surrealism), both of whom deftly blend dream content with unadorned, at times almost mundane language, in each case the noticeably unflashy style grounding a particular take on magical realism. Rutkowski, in turn, merges the quotidian and fabulist in his own way; most originally, perhaps, in “Equal Opportunity.” The word “might” shows up repeatedly in this piece, creating narrative and textual instability, that what is being related is perhaps a nightmarish musing, a vision of a regimented afterlife, or a paranoid delusion. Ostensibly the piece is a further commentary on the absurdity of corporate norms; however, it also operates as a scripted psychodrama with religious, existential, and metaphysical implications. The piece ends with a memorable meta-still-life: the narrator on the street, “[looking] into a store window to see a snowflake paperweight. Inside the glass ball a toy man might be shoveling fake snow. The flakes might swirl through the liquid air and settle at the man’s feet.”

In “Eleven-Dollar Ride,” Rutkowski employs the device of an unreliable speaker, another technique the tradition of which he’s absorbed and reconfigured, the narration subverted by ongoing reflective comments, including the one at the story’s conclusion: “…my mind is not in touch with reality. I’ve been having blackouts, or detachments, lately.” The speaker may sabotage his own credibility. But, he remains a source with whom the reader continues to sympathize, someone who seems oddly trustworthy, a bewildered everyman who deserves the benefit of the doubt.

In piece after piece, Rutkowski transcends realism on the level of plot, and yet his stories remain cohesive and tethered. After reading a final sentence, the reader rereads for clues, tics, and tells that might clarify a narrator’s quandary and motivations. At the heart of many of these pieces is an impenetrable mystery, as is frequently the case with dreams, undergirded and ironically highlighted by Rutkowski’s laconic voice, an almost indifferent stance, his literary posture that nothing of dramatic import is being conveyed.

There are eighty-six pieces in this collection; as one might imagine, a few fall flat. And while Rutkowski’s tone can, at times, grow a bit repetitive, most of the stories in Violent Outbursts are compelling and provocative. Keeping in mind that the relationship between author (or text) and reader is interactive and dynamic, the instantiation of meaning as much the reader’s responsibility as the author’s, it is clear that Rutkowski has done his job and done it well. He has met us more than halfway. The rest, as readers, is on us.

John Amen is the author of five collections of poetry: Christening the Dancer, More of Me Disappears, At the Threshold of Alchemy, The New Arcana (with Daniel Y. Harris), and, most recently, strange theater (New York Quarterly Books). His work has appeared in journals nationally and internationally and been translated into Spanish, French, Hungarian, Korean, and Hebrew. In addition, he has released two folk rock CDs: All I’ll Never Need and Ridiculous Empire. Further information is available on his website: www.johnamen.com. John is a frequent music reviewer for No Depression. He founded and continues to edit The Pedestal Magazine (www.thepedestalmagazine.com).