How Not To Be Rejected

on Tony Tulathimutte's Rejection

What ARX-Han once labeled and is now commonly derided with increasing abandon as literature’s secular purity culture, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection seems to signal at first glance, if not its full repudiation, then a loosening of the chastity belt. Its inaugural chapter The Feminist caused something of a stir after its N+1 debut; Tony had to remind Twitter he thought feminism was good and it was the titular character that was bad. The plot is straightforward enough: a male feminist–- named in the later story, Main Character, as “Craig”--goes through life failing to solicit romantic interest of the opposite sex until he eventually commits mass homicide. In 2024, the male-feminists-just-wants-to-get-laid trope is hardly scandalizing even on a major imprint, a point that would now be met with “duh” on just about every front of the culture wars. It’s to Tulathimutte’s credit then that rather than relying on pushing the envelope, he attempts to dive deeply into the lonely, tortured psyches that populate the digital age, if often to mixed results. 

Contrary to the trope, Craig in The Feminist isn’t faking his feminism to get laid. Rather he has internalized very deeply the doctrine of 2010s social justice, deploying its imperatives for the male ally with a belligerence that would make Adam Conover blush, and despite being the second most cartoonish protagonist of all the stories his pain is made so palpable he becomes difficult to laugh at. Like a lapsing priest, he spends years resisting his turn to darkness, despite compounding isolation, repeating the mantras of his dogma and trying to see the perspective of the other side. 

“After this incident, he develops thoughts of self-harm, which are sharpened by his 

awareness that rejection, loneliness, and sexual frustration are nothing compared to institutional and historical oppression. His sadness, he knows, is a symptom of his entitlement, so he is not even entitled to his sadness.” 

Rejection has garnered much praise for its twisted humor and absurdity, and though it's not entirely undue, its biggest triumph and concomitant failure is its unflinching realism. Much of the action takes place with the characters alone and online in their apartments. When their relationships inevitably blow up, it is often at the midpoint of a story, giving us pages more to watch these minds stew and deliquesce in their digital solitude. An argument with his female friends after hearing too many of his grievances severs the already frayed ties of Craig’s social life at the midpoint of The Feminist, sending him down the online blackpill rabbit hole. The mass homicide at the end, when he puts on a ski mask and walks into a restaurant, is only implied. This structure remains intact for the next story, Pics, in which Alison alienates her best friend after a one night stand leaves them with unreciprocated feelings. She spends much of her time online stalking him as he starts dating someone else, and the rest of her time in group chats with her friends whom she also alienates in one of the book’s best scenes at an ill-advised party involving a raven and vaginal primrose oil. This chapter is where Tulathimutte’s talent is most prominent, as every character in this seems not only lifelike, but ripped out of memory itself. There’s an “Allison” we all feel guilty for not having talked to in a while, despite the thought of doing so depleting all vitality. In Ahegao, a virgin niche porn addict named Kant meets and starts a relationship with a guy from his gym, only for it to fall apart due to his sexual repression–again at the story’s midpoint–allotting its remaining pages for a single joke that long overstays its welcome. The one story that breaks from this formula does so to its detriment: Our Dope Future, in which a Malcolm Collins-like hyper pronatalist optimizer recounts how he lost his girlfriend that he all but financially coerced, along with his plans to have a dozen babies that each have a dozen babies that each have dozen babies, in the frame of an Reddit-like AITA. The big epiphany here, as stated in the final line, is that no one ever told this character “No” before. It’s the kind of “insight into the human condition” you would more expect from an episode of Call Her Daddy than a well praised literary novel.  

You will notice the book does not say “a novel,” or “stories” but merely “fiction.” That is because what starts off as a collection of interconnected short stories eventually becomes ensnared in metafictional devices eschewing the story format altogether. In Main Character, the collection’s narrative climax, an author avatar named Bee assails her progressive classmate’s identitarianism until she becomes a social pariah, years later creating chatbots to start Twitter wars, as if to assail identity itself, until the Dead Internet Theory (here referred to as Puppet Master Theory) is brought nearly to its fruition. Bee’s story is framed as a forum post, which is revealed then to be one of many versions of the same story, its true author rumored to be someone by the name of Tony Tulathimutte. With the fourth wall broken, the short story format is then abandoned. It’s the kind of metafiction that some would call self indulging but in fact isn’t indulging enough.

 The final piece is a fictional editor's note to Tony stating why they are rejecting this book (called REJECTION), including some of the more obvious criticisms even the most casual reader would make. A more cynical critic might say that it serves no purpose beyond making itself immune to criticism by getting in front of it, but what's important here is what these scolding editors fixate on: which of these characters are simply disguised author avatars? As they note, the feminist in “The Feminist” may be a white guy, unlike Tony, but could it be his cataloging of male feminist hypocrisies is a way of Tony saying “I’m nothing like him.” And could his lighter treatment of Allison in Pics, be meant to signal, as the editors mockingly attest: 

“Now here’s a male writer who cares about the struggles of real women, who has considered things thoroughly from their viewpoint, who even credits them with human flaws!” 

I myself referred to Bee in Main Character as Tony’s Avatar, as these fictional editors also accuse, not in the way of a Mary Sue or object of wish fulfillment, but by the fact that she is his literal avatar in the story. Moreover, she is the most essayistic of any of the narrators, with lines like “The shitpost is the opposite of self-expression, it is expression minus the self. Whereas sadposts and thirst traps, teleologically identical forms of validation-seeking, are driven by ego, as are opinions, those being (in my opinion) the dangling silk of the toreador.”  In the end, Bee’s mission is the same as Tony’s in Re:Rejection: to create a maze of identities so obfuscating that identity itself becomes nugatory; this aspect, despite all the masturbation, twink porn, hookups and vaginal oil stains, is the closest the book gets to transgression.

But perhaps I’m reaching. Re:Rejection could just as likely be Tony’s way of saying “Maybe I am these characters, maybe I’m not” as if that sort of non-mystery could make a meaningful coda. In doing so he rejects what Iris Murdoch called “the contingent” inherent in the novel, the sense that any of these characters have free reign of their own destinies. This can be worth doing, and up until the end seems like it could be heading towards some kind of emotional center. Mr. Tulathimutte would have been better off leaning into the real life neurosis he puts half on display here, or even the sentimentalism he had so adroitly avoided for two hundred pages, but instead he breaks the fourth wall just to stand there. What we’re left with is a book that purports to explore “the underrated sorrows of rejection” but can no more commit to an emotion than it can commit to a form. Though Rejection might break from some of the taboos defining literature of the late 2010s, it cannot shake off the era’s furtive self awareness. If I should feel silly for pointing that out despite the book itself having beaten me to the punch, it’s not half as silly as the author’s workshop must feel confronting ordinary human melancholy.