Haywire

Fiction. Asian American Studies. Thaddeus Rutkowski's deadpan, darkly funny third novel is comprised of 49 unsentimental stories narrated by the son of a Polish-American artist father and a Chinese-American mother. A bildungsroman with unexpected twists, the narrative spirals out from the insular life of a biracial teenager into a surrealistic, giddy page-turner once the narrator's obsessive fetishism begins to develop, and the reader is pulled along by the nose ring through a heady combination of literary and voyeuristic appeal. Our narrator eventually learns to get along with, even love, the people around him, but the feeling doesn't come easily. John Barth has called Rutkowski's work "tough and funny and touching and harrowing," and Alison Lurie has said that "Rutkowski is one of the most original writers in America today. Once you've read his low-key, continually surprising fiction, the world will look different to you--maybe just for an hour, maybe forever."