Review of Safe Colors: a novel in short fictions

Thaddeus Rutkowski, Safe Colors: a novel in short fictions, New Meridian Arts, www.newmeridianarts.com   distributed by Amazon, 2023 272 pages $20.00 paperback

Readers of Rutkowski’s previous droll fictions will recognize certain basic themes: a biracial family consisting of a white father, a Chinese Mother, and three children: two boys and a girl.  The narrator is a much put upon, unpopular at school, boy who seems to be the father’s primary target for casual disdain and outright hostility. The father is a frustrated artist whose treatment of the narrator is almost sadistic in its cruelty as he sets impossible standards and creates tasks for the boy that are designed to lead to failure. These failures are excuses for recriminations and violent behavior fueled by the man’s increasingly obvious descent into alcoholism. His mother is passive, more at home with memories of growing up in China than she is in the daily life of rural Pennsylvania where the family resides.  Opposites must truly attract as it is difficult to imagine two more unlikely paired people as the kind, practical, nurturing mother, and the vicious, asshole father. One often wonders how these two people got together in the first place.

The first section primarily deals with this cruelty. The child is forced to learn “manly” things” that he has no interest in and proves to be incompetent at. His less than enthusiastic efforts earn admonishments and belittling tirades by the increasingly unstable, paranoid father. Father projects his personal failings as provider, and parent, onto the kids rather than examining himself. He feels that he can never get ahead because his family is a burden, he cannot escape; typical behavior of a hardcore alcohol. Eventually Thaddeus, the narrator, ends his high school career as an extremely mixed-up young man who has difficulty forming interpersonal relationships while displaying some of the paranoid traits of his father. While this all seems grim and depressing, Rutkowski’s narrative gift, always tongue in cheek, both glib and darkly humorous at the same time, save the stories from becoming depressing. Each brief chapter could be read as a standalone short story and no doubt, many were. That said, there is a clear, sequential,  narrative progression, though necessarily episodic given the technique, guiding the reader along on this odd coming of age story.

Part two finds our narrator in the City, post college, rootless and shiftless, trying to find a direction in life. He works for medical journals and other odd, no future  jobs, does drugs, exists in a kind of low-grade depression without much comfort or human connection. When you can’t find the energy to clean your cat box, you know there are major issues in your life that need to be addressed and remedied.   He has girlfriends, hooks up for a memorable evening with Jerzy Kosinski, has his palm read at a party, and sees “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” at the movies. If these are the highlights of your daily life something better change. And they do. His father dies offstage  and no one seems to care all that much. His brother announces he has cancer and dies not long after. His beloved mother is in failing health and yet, we are not depressed,  because the narrator ‘s matter of fact approach to everything that happens, no matter how outrageous or mundane, is consistently droll. Safe Colors is rarely laugh out loud funny but always has a wry, black humorous edge that a less deft hand would make unbearably bleak.

By Part three, Thaddues is married, has  a family of his own and an unexpected inheritance from his secretly wealthy, lawyer brother.  He sees a therapist, has some typically messed up encounters involving bicycles, and manages to muddle through a day-to-day existence. Still, nothing is too mundane, too simple, that the narrator can’t make a complete and utter botch of it. And yet, he has a gift for survival and relative happiness. Thaddues is never too up or down seemingly able to thrive in a non-judgmental, idiosyncratic way. 

Rutkowski is a rare writer whose work excels in a way particular to him. At once, his stories seem personal but differ from work to work enough that you sense that the autobiographical element is more of a: based on, than: this happened to me. They are fictions, not memoir, after all. These are modern, droll stories, told by an author with a gift for understatement and a subtle understanding of the tenuous human connections that keep people together.