Rejection
by tony tulathimutte
william morrow, 272 pages, $28
Tony Tulathimutte’s breakthrough short story “The Feminist,” published in the literary magazine n+1, generated significant online controversy six years ago. The protagonist, an obsequious male feminist, fails to secure even a crumb of female sexual interest. Gradually, he becomes a rage-filled incel, convinced that his narrow shoulders have doomed him to the world’s most despised subaltern caste.
I was impressed by the story, but I was also curious whether it would go the way of Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person.” Published by the New Yorker in 2017, the story went viral among the #MeToo crowd for its depiction of a young woman’s unenjoyable sexual encounter with an older man who styles himself a “cat person” before revealing his darker side; Roupenian’s subsequent story collection drew little attention. “The Feminist” was read by many as the male answer to “Cat Person,” hence its own virality. Rejection, Tulathimutte’s debut story collection, overrides any concern that he is a one-hit wonder. The book is packed with humor and delivers a brutal indictment of “the way we live now” without descending into didacticism.
Tulathimutte has a remarkable capacity for both empathy and ridicule, sometimes in the same sentence or even the same word, and his collection traverses wildly different dispositions and identities. The stories generally hew to the theme of romantic rejection, hence the title, though they also deal with rejection in a wider sense. Characters use and discard one another, or remain physically and spiritually isolated, as they navigate a dating landscape as arid as the Sahara and just as strewn with mirages. Identity, perhaps inevitably, is also a key object of concern. In her essay collection My First Book, Honor Levy writes: “Identity is a Swedish prison, comfortable but still you can’t leave.” In Tulathimutte’s world, identity is more like a Soviet gulag. One of his characters scorns the idea that “a checkbox on a form is a service tunnel to a stranger’s soul.”
One of the most impressive aspects of Rejection is how Tulathimutte plays both sides of the scorched battlefield of modern romance. In “The Feminist,” the first short story in the collection, he faithfully renders the carnage of the sexual revolution and sneaks in a critique of intersectional feminist pieties. He follows up “The Feminist” with “Pics,” in which a young woman’s heart is broken after she hooks up with a male friend who then rejects her. Everything about the story is pitch-perfect, from its simulation of a girls’ group chat to the protagonist’s performative idiosyncrasy she uses to shore up her wounded ego—buying a talking raven.
The other stories include a sexually repressed, gay, Thai-American man with cartoonishly violent sexual fantasies and a demented start-up founder who optimizes himself into a particularly dark place. One after another, Tulathimutte’s characters deform their relationships by excessive analysis, locking themselves inside their own subjective prison cells. Rejection enacts “the barbarism of reflection” the eighteenth-century Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico predicted would overwhelm and enervate civilization, disconnecting us from our past shared senses of meaning.
The characters all desperately need love, but they let themselves become nothing more than aching, unappeasable need, constantly sucking and teething at the world around them. Their lives are eaten up by the maintenance of appearances that are only rejected by a chorus of their equally deluded peers. Such rejection leads to rage, despair, or both. This is a world in which the unique value of the person is completely superseded by sexual status.
It’s a good evocation of how online modes of consciousness have changed people. Tulathimutte’s characters are uninterested in anything other than their own position in the greater social and sexual economy, the “domain of struggle.” (His work is comparable to Michel Houellebecq’s in this regard, but funnier.) At one point he writes: “Twitter was the right word for it, birdsong being a Darwinian squall mistaken for idle chatter, screaming for territory and mates.” Even the woman who buys the talking raven does so only to craft a quirky image; she has no authentic interest in birds. No one at any point establishes a relationship with reality.
The final piece, “Rejection,” is an imaginary publisher’s letter rejecting the book itself. It is pure in its self-consuming, self-reflecting madness—a presumably tongue-in-cheek attempt to manage how the book itself will be perceived and to highlight all its flaws. It proceeds through all the stories, critiquing the author and pointing out his various feints and tricks and blind spots. This rejection letter is itself a crystalline example of “the barbarism of reflection,” the ouroboros of the mind gnawing its tail forever.
Don’t ask this book for solutions—or even wisdom. It is an act of dissection, of seeing. And what it sees are the varied ways sexual relationships fail to satisfy (or even manifest) when the beleaguered human self is forced to conjure its own dignity, with no appeal to divine aid.
