What does literary fiction have to offer the chronically online ‒ people who spend more time gaming, gooning and doomscrolling than reading? And what do the chronically online have to offer fiction writers; what plot points can be crafted from our inaction, what motivation from our compulsive sating of surface desires?
There are reasons fiction hasn’t kept pace with the changing ways we live. Thai-American author Tony Tulathimutte, who’s 41, nevertheless plays catch-up in his book of stories, Rejection, upping the difficulty by casting powerfully self-pitying, misanthropic, misogynistic and malevolent characters, people who not only experience rejection but come to identify as rejects.
In the opening story, The Feminist, we meet a “nice guy”, a gender studies major who, despite devoting all his energy to understanding women, just can’t get laid. The Feminist blames his narrow shoulders, but it’s socially that he’s most underdeveloped; flirtation’s “subtextual cues no more perceptible to him than ultraviolet radiation”.
The Feminist is comically desperate to come across as an ally, his online dating profile leading with “Unshakeably serious about consent. Abortion’s #1 fan”. Despite virtue-skywriting in public, he privately stews about the broad-shouldered guys getting the girls. “Dragging his virginity like a body bag,” the wound of rejection turns septic and he adopts an incel’s checklist of obsessions and anxieties: depo-testosterone, canthal tilt, death-grip syndrome.
Given a wake-up call on the Narrow Shoulders/Open Minds (NSOM) blog, The Feminist slams the phone. Having done everything right, in his view, for the past 40-something years, he comments, calling out the “mass abrogation of the social contract by the legions of treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets”.
Villain arc completed, what he does next further ties The Feminist to Elliot Rodger, the socially impaired, slender-framed, self-described “sophisticated polite gentleman”, whose lack of the sexual and romantic attention he felt he deserved drove him to kill six people and injure more in Isla Vista, California in 2014.
Several of the stories in Rejection work this way. Tulathimutte presents marginal personalities, caricatures played for laughs in TV series such as Girls and High Maintenance, and keeps adding detail, cross-hatching in the darkest recesses of their minds.
In Pics, love-starved Alison spirals after having supposedly no-strings-attached sex with a pal, “occasionally posting a cryptic song lyric, ones where if he went and looked up the line right after it, he’d see it was about him and hopefully be devastated”. She complains in her friend group chat, dates a string of men she saves to her phone as icks (Mesh Shorts, Mr Gifs, The Feminist) and buys a raven in a cuckoo attempt to stave off loneliness. All of it – pal, friend group, lovers, even the bird – gets swallowed by the validation-consuming vacuum inside her.
Eminently vulnerable, Alison is love-bombed, gaslit and economically entrapped by a tech bro named Max in the story Our dope future. With all the room-reading powers of Elon Musk, Max relates the tale of their failed relationship on a site like Reddit, underscoring his rizz, generosity and drive, including the desire to have at least a dozen kids using IVF (“four per gestation cycle would strike the ideal balance between fast and reliable”.) Learning in the comments that he’s not just the OP (original poster) but an op (the opposition) doesn’t compute: “If everything I did was so evil, how is it that up until now not a single person ever told me No?”
The protagonist of Ahegao, or The Ballad of Sexual Repression, is a closeted gay sadist named Kant who’s as blinded by self-loathing as Max is by narcissism. Deciding it’s the only way he can satisfy his hideous desires, he commissions impossibly depraved pornography – the kind that can be realised only by using special effects – from an OnlyFans-esque creator. The script, which makes Sam Rockwell’s sex monologue in White Lotus seem tame, is a Chekhov’s gun of humiliation just waiting to go off.
Where Kant excessively identifies with his kinks, his sibling Bee abandons identity altogether. They sell their gender to a kid named Sean for $22, noting, in a sublime turn of phrase, that “before I learned gender was fluid, I’d learned it was liquid”. Refusing even to identify as non-binary, Bee infuriates well-meaning, category-obsessed classmates. Disgusted by “bad-faith identity-cels” and confident that “discourse is loneliness disguised as war”, Bee dedicates theirselves to elaborate online trolling operations, like The Joker with a Twitter account.
Tulathimutte is extremely witty, his knowledge of the digital discourse-loneliness-war way beyond Wikipedic, but oof, Rejection is brutal, the characters so mercilessly denied love, hope and redemption. They wallow in grievance, weaponising it, like Trump voters or Netanyahu apologists. It’s a temptation available to us all; to enumerate your grievances and find them wanting only helps level the score.
In the final tale, Re: Rejection, Tulathimutte imagines us disliking not only his characters but the book itself. It’s a rejection letter written by a fictional publisher who wonders if the manuscript isn’t “trying to espouse the conventional literary virtues of insight, empathy, fun and so on” because the author is deliberately soliciting rejection. In that regard, Rejection is a failure. All the poisonous Ivy League-level black-pilled rumination will leave you with a rash, but the book is also compelling, courageous and unusually engaged with the growing portion of people who feel abandoned, left out and looked over.
Rejection, by Tony Tulathimutte (HarperCollins, $24.99), is out now.
