Actually Pretty Good: Rejection
On Tony Tulathimutte's portraits of curdled grievance
The days after an election are ripe territory for pundits of any stripe to start coming up with narratives as to why one side lost; you take a look at the exit polls, find some demographics who turned one way, analyze some events with the benefit of hindsight, and you’ve got yourself a postmortem. This time around, the op-ed stars of America have cohered their inquiry into a single question: where do we find a Joe Rogan for the left? Because Trump went on Joe Rogan’s show and Kamala didn’t, and because some young swing voters pointed to that as a reason they swung to Trump, and because of the erosion of young male voters within the Democratic base, this has been the drumbeat of the last three weeks, a cultural-affairs panacea that’s easier to put together than any sort of ‘complex’ ‘analysis’ on ‘thousands of economic and social factors.’ The real answer to why things broke the way they did could probably only be conveyed by some kind of 1000 page postmodern omnibus novel; what we get instead are 1000 word columns and half-baked twitter threads. But let’s take them at their word, and try to find the answer to their question of how to penetrate the ‘manosphere,’ which is really, how do you reach all these lonely (who else is listening to three hour long podcasts?), disaffected (Rogan’s politics are broadly anti-elite and anti-authoritarian, though mostly he is a very curious and very stupid man who believes and parrots whatever the last person he spoke with told him) people? If their lives could be ameliorated by Democratic policies, would we even be able to get the message to them? What do they want, and why are they so angry? Who knows, and I’m sure in a month or so every writer will have had their eyes caught by whatever shiny bauble pops up next (something something, wokeness, culture war, whatever controversy is roiling a small liberal arts college), so we might never get an answer to those open ended questions. Perhaps the first step is to simply pay some attention to those young lonely lives, and perhaps no one’s done it with such pointillist detail, with such a focus on the grimy texture of these lives, than Tony Tulathimutte in his (pre-election) book of short stories, Rejection.
The characters of Rejection are (Ferris Bueller school receptionist voice) losers, incels, volcels, forum dwellers, spinsters, bot farmers, tech evangelists, porn addicts, VC bros, virgins, trolls, and, most of all, spurned in some essential, self-defining way. These are not people you’d avoid at a party, because they never got invited in the first place; they are your good friend’s freshman year roommate who never left the dorm (weird guy, whatever happened to him?), that coworker who was nice enough but also kind of bugged you, the woman at your friend’s picnic on their phone the whole time (what was her name again?)
While the first couple stories deal with romantic rejection, which then extends into wider societal estrangement, by the end the stories are dealing with the rejection of identity itself, a separation from common human experience. “The Feminist,” a story that initially (and controversially) ran in n+1 in 2019, details a man’s long, mostly sexless transformation from feminist ally to blackpilled misogynist. “Pics” follows a woman who sleeps with her friend one time; after he decides not to pursue a relationship, she stays hung up on him for years, torpedoing her life in the process (including the all-time bad idea of getting a pet crow). “Ahegao: Or the Ballad of Sexual Repression,” the centerpiece of the book, focuses on Kant, a man who comes out later in his life and then struggles to find any kind of connection, mainly because he’s addicted to subjugation porn, and can only get off to a fantasy that can’t be replicated in real life. It’s a comic inversion of the heartwarming coming-out tale; it features not only a mortifying depiction of Kant trying to have a relationship with a somewhat basic guy, and their fumbling attempts at intimacy, but also an extended and graphic accounting of Kant’s true sexual desires, a section so profane that it got The New Yorker to print the words “like a penis entering another penis via anal penetration, and protruding tip from tip ‘like a pig-in-a-blanket’”, and The New York Times to more demurely print this sentence: “The ‘phallothermic energy’ that his member radiates will reverse climate change, and ‘my individual spermatozoa are so tall and charismatic that they’re elected to lead the G8 nations.’” The gristlier passages of Updike, Pynchon, Burroughs, and Bataille have a new companion with Tulathimutte, and that poor liver from Portnoy’s Complaint can finally rest easy. (Coming right after my reading of All Fours, I may have developed new wrinkles on my forehead from all the intimate details to which I’ve been exposed over the past couple weeks.)
These are linked stories, and so these central (yet isolated) characters will pop up in another’s story, not so much in moments where we see their inner perception of events was wrong, but rather a Rashomon-style catalogue of abjection. Put another way: that time you thought you embarrassed yourself in public and everyone noticed, when you seemed like the world’s biggest loser on a date that went nowhere, well, those times were actually just as bad as you thought, even from the perspective of someone just as terminally unlikeable as you. The narrator of “Pics” goes on a date with “The Feminist” and we hear it from his side:
He insists on paying for drinks, joking that it’s not chivalry, it’s reparations for sexism. He soon regrets it, however, because on her third whiskey ginger (and his first), she starts rambling about some guy who dumped her ages ago, then jokes about her eating disorder. Every few minutes her face scrunches like she’s about to cry, then reverts weirdly to normal. Her blouse untucks, and when a guy playing pool nearby positions his cue close to her face, she slaps it to the floor.
And from her’s:
The date was powerfully bad. He’s so weenily deferential, overgroomed in his little blazer with a graphic tee and matching Vans and raw selvedge denim. He has that sort of lenticular baldness where you can see the thinning patches only at an angle. Unlike most guys, he does ask her questions about herself, albeit terminally dull ones of the sort you’d ask to calibrate a polygraph test – what do you do, where have you lived, what’ve you been reading lately. She pays attention only to gather cruel observations to pass on to the group chat later.
Both of them pity one another, and both think they have a measure of power over the other; the effect of seeing it twice is to know that they’re equally pathetic, and equally incapable of forging any kind of connection because of their myopia. Note her gathering of evidence for a group chat – relationships are to be mined for a kind of social capital; on the other side, the Feminist files their unsatisfying tryst (he’s masturbated so much that he can’t really have sex) as another instance of the unfairness of his life. The internet in its publicity almost act as a huge ledger for these characters, who are constantly looking to hoist themselves into a superior position; Tulathimutte is particularly attuned to the way in which social justice terms and theories, nominally meant to describe the world and then help create a more equitable world, are actually used to settle personal scores, establishing a hierarchy of oppressed classes with which one can easily turn an argument. In the middle of a contentious discussion, “People said Mmm at the phrase 'refugee family’ like she’d fed them something delicious.” This is one prong of Tulathimutte’s highly pitched satire of contemporary life; the other, and more thorny target, are some of the contradictions of identity politics, whether that’s the simple fact that a strident male feminist may be more unattractive than a garden variety misogynist, maybe only because of their looks, or that a racial identifier like “Asian-American” or a sexual orientation like “queer” might flatten a person into a certain set of assumed traits and interests rather than liberate or empower them.
Tulathimutte’s style is cold and clinical throughout the first three stories, third person observational like a camera in a cringe-comedy show, just laying out fact after fact, detail after detail, before Kant’s extended fantasia in “Aheago” explodes the book into more first person voice work. “Our Dope Future” is styled as a Reddit-AITA type post by a deranged hustle culture tech doofus, while “Main Character” concerns a person named Bee who rejects their own sexual and racial identifiers and then themself(ves) become a horde of fake people on the internet, sowing distrust in the idea that anyone you encounter online is real, ending in a meta-positioning of Tulathimutte as an avatar of Bee himself. This meta streak extends to the final two stories, especially in the closer “Re: Rejection,” a faux rejection letter about the very book you’re reading. (“Sixteen Metaphors,” the penultimate story, is a close as we get to a filler track.) Between the postmodern trickery and the very hideous men involved, comparisons to David Foster Wallace are easy, but Tulathimutte’s writing is less showy, and he has not (yet) taken Foster Wallace’s turn towards any kind of sincerity; irony, cruel and otherwise, rules over this collection. The effect of this unrelenting satirical tone can sometimes approach exhaustion; between bouts of recognition, there are also times when things line up too neatly, when a side character delivers a line (or text) that too neatly sums up a situation, in a way that estranges one from the real; but Tulathimutte’s commitment to a thick texture of physical particulars keeps things relatively grounded, stacking up so many signifiers of real, mortifying life as to remain out of the realm of cheap mockery. He’s paying more attention to these kind of people than anyone else does, whether you enjoy it or not, and he has a descriptive flair for the many pathetic fallacies of the contemporary world, especially the slop we eat every day: “One day at work, while he’s waiting for the microwave to finish heating up a cheese-and-mushroom tart, a quantity of urine dribbles out unbidden”; “for lunch she eats the same soggy gyro at the halal cart outside her office instead of going to the chopped-salad place two blocks farther, and for dinner she stuffs a cold flour tortilla with turkey slices and shredded mozzarella and a squirt of mayo, each ingredient the same color as her, rolled up into a hateful dildo she crams in her mouth, barely chewing”; “The first thing Kant notices in the bedroom is a bowl on the nightstand, holding three uneaten potstickers in an evaporated puddle of soy sauce”; “I saw a GIANT hole in the market for savory-yet-functional flavors like Adaptogen Grilled Cheese, CBD Clam Chowder, and Piracetam BBQ Ribs, all with a little kick of caffeine, at a price point so competitive it’d be perfect for schools, hospitals, and correctional facilities. As a founder I live and breathe and, in this case, drink my products, so I haven’t eaten solids at home or bought groceries in years.”
While plenty of authors can describe what being on the internet is like – and Tulathimutte is quite good at that, and sometimes spends too much time replicating eerily exact transcripts of group chats and twitter feeds – few authors are as good at describing what physically being on the internet is like, the carpal tunnel thumbs, the cricked necks, the hunched backs, eyes strained by dark rooms lit only by bright blue light, various members rubbed insensate. However much of a mental toll social media and group chats take on the characters, it is doubly enacted on their poorly postured bodies in perpetual repose. One character gets a neck spasm from her deskbound job; her elderly doctor remarks, “Military neck, we used to call it… though you kids call it tech neck, how’s that for a generation gap? Jiminy Christmas, it feels like I’m massaging an anvil. You must love that phone of yours.” This generation may not be in the trenches, but they are constantly under siege, contorting their bodies to get another blast from their phone, their laptop, their TV. Whatever possibility of connection the screens offer is countermanded by a physically debilitating yet oddly entrancing solitariness. Jiminy Christmas, indeed; Tulathimutte doesn’t show a way out of this predicament so much as rub your face in it. What are you doing reading this email, anyway? Touch grass.
If the prevailing mode of short fiction writing at the moment is the workshop friendly moment of epiphany – either that or a modern shapelessness – Tulathimutte’s stories harken back to an earlier tradition, that of the twist, the cliffhanger, the grim realization, the supremacy of the final line. Jia Tolentino pointed to the stories and last-second reversals of O. Henry in her New Yorker appraisal of the book, and there’s also a note of John O’Hara and a little Edgar Allan Poe in these stories’ devious embrace of plot, some final twists of the knife after so much descriptive assault. There are enough gut-punches to call it the feel-bad book of the year, but at least you’ll be laughing a bit, too.
Will reading Rejection help you bridge the loneliness gap and connect to disaffected youth voters across the country, thus rebuilding the Democratic base and enshrining a new government of dignity and freedom? No, but neither will reading op-ed columns; at least you’ll have a better time with this book and its attendant delights, the quality of its observations, the sick pleasure of its provocations. It can at the very least give you a sense of how deep the hole we’ve gotten ourselves into is, and how often the advice and bromides that are offered up about Where We Go From Here generally amount to something as helpful as “Dig Up, Stupid!”
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