Book Review: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte
The Great Millennial Doomer Novel
Tony Tulathimutte made a big splash when his short story, “The Feminist,” was published in n+1 Magazine in 2019. To this day, it remains the magazine’s most read fiction piece.
It’s easy to see why. It’s an excellent story that hits a nerve. It’s an uncompromisingly uncomfortable story about an unattractive man’s journey from a male feminist ally to a murderous incel.
Throughout the story, we read of his failure to pick up on flirting and dating cues, his insecurity about his narrow shoulders, and his fixation on feminist philosophy which he clings to like a life preserver.
“But in college, he encounters the alien system of codes and manners that govern flirting, conveyed in subtextual cues no more perceptible to him than ultraviolet radiation.”
He finds himself incapable of changing and coming to terms with himself. He finds himself surrounded with people who could care less about his problems. He finds himself without the tools to improve himself and instead spirals.
He develops strange fixations like worrying he doesn’t cum as much as he used to when he masturbates. He falls out with all of his friends. His only sexual encounter goes so disastrously that it’s borderline traumatizing.
The spiral the titular Feminist goes down seems at the same time inevitable and completely preventable. Being stuck in the head and life of this character is both excruciating and compelling. Tulathimutte paints a picture of a societal reject who feels all too real.
If I had to compare Tulathimutte’s fiction to something, it would be the films of Todd Solondz and Neil LaBute. Dark comedies which dig into such painful topics that one is usually more compelled to cringe and feel sick than they are to laugh, but the humor is undeniable.
Rejection is best described as a novel-in-stories. Each chapter can work as self-contained narratives, but they all tie into each other, and the subsequent chapters bring a lot more meaning to the prior ones.
The next story/chapter is “Pics.” Here, we meet Alison. The one person that the Feminist from the prior story slept with. We get a good idea of what her major malfunction is, which the first story certainly leaves one wondering.
Alison is also unlucky in love. Not that she never gets laid, but she feels she never had a meaningful relationship. Even her longest one was with a man who turned out to be in the closet.
"Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure."
She ends up having a one-night stand with her close friend Neil. Afterwards, she finds herself head over heels for him. The problem is, he doesn’t feel the same. Shortly after, Neil meets the woman he would go on to marry.
This sends Alison on her own downward spiral. She alienates herself from her friends (with whom she had a very shallow relationship anyway), she begins treating dating and hooking up as a form of self-harm (which explains why she sleeps with the Feminist), and she buys a pet raven in order to have a unique identity (which she does no research on and eventually sends her to the hospital).
The only thing she has through it all is a picture of Neil’s dick in her mouth. She finds it an ugly picture, but views it as the only thing remaining of her one happy moment.
Everything comes to a head when Neil invites Alison to his wedding. She confronts him about rejecting her. Her ending isn’t nearly as violent as the Feminist’s, but finds her in a place where even violence is a pointless response. A low point that it seems will become the baseline for the rest of her life.
In a way, “Pics” is a response to “The Feminist.” It rejects the idea that having sex is a fulfilling experience in itself, instead viewing it as a misdirected desire for love and acceptance. It also adamantly rejects the idea that women have it any better in the dating world than men. They agree with one thing though; loneliness and social isolation will drive you mad.
“Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” is about a thirty-something gay Thai man who goes by the name Kant. He chooses to come out to his friends, family, and others via email. However, this does nothing to lift years and years of repression, shame, and bullying from his shoulders. Furthermore, his sadist/dominate desires make him feel even more like his own sexuality is filthy and wrong.
Kant lucks into meeting Julian, a handsome, kind, and understanding man. They enter into a relationship, despite Kant doing everything he can to avoid sex after their first try ends in a bleeding anus. Despite Julian’s best efforts, their relationship falls apart.
“Kant perceives the true rift between them: Julian doesn’t know the difference between embarrassment and shame. How shame soaks, stains, leaves a skid mark on everything, and, when it has nothing to stick to, spreads until it does.”
Kant goes back to his dating and sex life consisting of nothing but internet pornography. I won’t go into the ending, but it’s one of the most brutally embarrassing, hilarious, and tragic things in the book. Sometimes being perceived is far worse than avoiding the gaze of others.
“Our Dope Future” comes back to Alison from the perspective of an ex-boyfriend, a rich techbro. It’s told through a Reddit post where he recounts their relationship in detail. An awful, excruciating amount of detail.
I read the novel Fuccboi a while back and absolutely hated it. Especially how it was written almost entirely in slang. This story uses a similar technique of writing entirely in slang, but recognizes something important. A guy who writes like that is probably an unbearable shithead.
Reading the casual way this techbro emotionally abuses Alison in service of his own twisted view of life and relationships gave me the most sympathy for a character in any of these stories. The biggest consolation is that Alison eventually gets back at him and gets him good. This story almost feels like throwing a bone to the readers as one actually leaves it with a sense of catharsis rather than feeling like you need a shower.
“Main Character” is also in the form of an internet post, this time an entry in a wiki site. This is the longest story of the bunch and the center of the novel. Have you ever seen an internet troll and wondered what kind of person could sit online all day and make others miserable? This is a look into that.
Bee is the younger sibling of Kant and was introduced in “The Feminist” as the titular character’s “QPOC agender friend.” The bulk of the wiki post is a confession from Bee telling their life story. They talk about having gone goth and shaved their head to rebel against their mother’s traditionalism, the manipulative and codependent relationships they had as a young adult, and their various internet scams that made them independently wealthy. With not having to work, Bee dedicates themself to their true passion, which is making people’s lives miserable on the internet.
This story is an interesting shift from the prior ones. Like “Our Dope Future,” I felt nothing but contempt for this character, but there’s no real catharsis. You can tell Bee neither wants sympathy, nor gives anyone any. They seem disturbingly indifferent, even proud of a pile-on they led against Craig (the Feminist) contributing to putting him on a violent path, and they treat a codependent relationship with a woman even more manipulative and narcissistic than them as a big joke they happened to fall for.
Bee rejects their Thai identity and any gender identity in favor of the anonymity of the internet. The problem is, the only joy they get is inflicting discomfort on others. They proudly recall various Twitter spats that they were responsible for in great detail. Reading these made me feel like my brain was souping up and leaking out of my ears, which is exactly how reading about Twitter spats second-hand should make you feel.
The story ends with appendices questioning the truth of Bee’s post and presenting other theories, including that Bee is actually a collective of other people, and that Bee is a pseudonym for the author Tony Tulathimutte engaging in internet performance art. I’m sure Bee would be pleased that many don’t give them credit for the pain they caused. They only want to affect others without being perceived.
The book ends with two codas. The first is “Sixteen Metaphors.” This is more a prose poem where Tulathimutte twists various aphorisms about dating and love into the most pessimistic sayings possible.
“There are plenty of fish in the sea. But you’re not a fish, just the ugly idiot trying to catch one.”
The final coda is “Re: Rejection,” which is written as a rejection letter for the book itself. One could view this as a tactic to undermine criticism of the book. However, it seems like a book on the theme of rejection could really end no other way. The only thing I question is if an editorial board would really take the time to write a rejection this detailed.
Rejection is an excellent book. If I read a better one the remainder of this year, I’ll be shocked. Tony Tulathimutte is an excellent prose stylist with a sharp eye for the sorrows of modern life. Every story paints the most pathetically human moments of people who want nothing more to be loved and the embarrassing, awful things they’ll do for it. They’re painful portraits of the everyday cruelty and inhumanity we knowingly and often unknowingly inflict on others.
Buy Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte here.
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