A Story Collection About People Who Just Can’t Hang

Not until I picked up Tony Tulathimutte’s “Rejection” did I realize how fun it could be to read a book about a bunch of huge fucking losers. It sucks for them, the inept, lonely, self-obsessed, self-righteous, self-imprisoned protagonists of these linked stories, but it’s a thrill for the sickos among us, the king being Tulathimutte, who gives loserdom its own rancid carnival. Tulathimutte understands the project—both his own and that of his characters—with diagnostic, comprehensive hyper-precision; as you behold his parade of marketplace failure and personal pathology, he’s ten steps ahead of any reaction you could muster. Thus, you simply surrender to the sick pleasure of watching humiliating people humiliate themselves, as when a clammy self-styled feminist ally gets shut down by a girl and goes, “Grrr, friend-zoned again!” while shaking his fists at the ceiling, then creates a dating profile that includes the line “Unshakably serious about consent. Abortion’s #1 fan.” These are two of the mildest things to happen in this incredibly depraved book.

The first story in the collection, called “The Feminist” and originally published in n+1 in 2019, is about that clammy ally, who is initially drawn to feminism out of adolescent insecurity—a world view that valorizes women seems like the best way to demonstrate his value to said women—and then gradually asphyxiates on rage when feminism does not get him laid. Tulathimutte provides mini-metaphors for the ally’s self-impairment: adopting a “dry” method of masturbation to avoid shameful squelching, he loses sensation in his penis as a result. (“When he manages to ejaculate it falls out of him like a touchless soap dispenser,” Tulathimutte writes.) His relationship with reality curdles to the point that he’s writing thousand-word posts on incel forums; we see him compose one sentence that begins, “I’d be the last to demand any special treatment for my actual, unselfish, principled feminism” and ends by castigating women as “treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets.” “Examining what he’d written, scouring it with an unsparing eye toward logic and tone, he finds no error,” Tulathimutte writes.

The subject of the next story, Alison, is able to attract sex and passing attention, but the thing she wants—for someone to desire her intensely and specifically—eludes her. “Love is mutual: which means Alison’s never been in love,” the story begins. She becomes obsessed with a friend whom she sleeps with once, spending months and then years with no other topic of interest in her brain. At first she appears functional, mainly owing to cowardice: “The closest she gets to openly criticizing him is to occasionally post 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,” Tulathimutte writes. Then, having repressed her fixation for a while, she explodes into a spiral of racist insecurity when the friend brings a new girlfriend to drinks. (As with the clammy ally, who’s revealed in a later story to be named Craig, Alison believes she craves love but mainly seems to want power.) Realizing that the void has grown too large, Alison decides to get a pet, and ends up choosing a raven, a “flesh-ripping fiend with a knife for a face.”

Like the rest of the main characters, Craig and Alison come to disturbing, almost unbelievable, possibly inevitable ends. One of the delights of Tulathimutte’s book is his revival of some unfashionable formal pleasures—the theatrically ironic, O. Henry-style twist ending, the linked-short-story collection. (Here, reveals of the various ways that the characters in the book know one another sneak up like waves of nausea, capturing the torturous fact that the people who figure most prominently in our secret shames and desires might well have devoted barely a thought to us at all.) But, at first, Craig and Alison are ordinary—bad but redeemable. The self-sabotaging characters in “Rejection” usually have at least one friend who attempts intervention. (“I do not think it’s unfair to say you have a habit of passively consenting to miserable situations, or even baiting them out of people, so you can later weaponize your sadness,” Alison’s friend tells her.) But after they eat from the fruit of perceived victimhood, they turn insufferable. (After Alison accidentally unleashes her raven on another friend’s child, she instigates a group-chat meltdown, dragging the girlies for posting normie captions like “Celebrating five years with this dumbass who brings me cold brew sometimes 😺.”) The characters become totally isolated—Alison’s regular dinner becomes a tortilla, deli turkey, shredded mozzarella, and mayonnaise, “rolled up into a hateful dildo”—and then they act out in some shocking, irreversible way.

“The Feminist” was the most read piece of fiction in n+1’s history, and so some readers of “Rejection” will anticipate the way a couple of endings move past cringe into criminal. This is a break from the short-fiction tradition in which lonely, monstrous protagonists don’t do much. Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, tired of burdening his family with his big bug body, decides to simply expire. The title character of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Outsider” looks at his reflection for the first time, sees a “compound of all that is unclean, uncanny, unwelcome, abnormal, and detestable,” and takes up drinking nepenthe for the duration. David Foster Wallace’s titular Depressed Person dwindles into existential nothingness, a speck of dust in the vacuum of her agonized solipsism. Tulathimutte chooses to activate his rejects. The “true rejection plot is the one the reject devises in the absence of a plot,” he wrote, in April, in The Paris Review. He’s interested in the way rejection prompts not just inward harm but outward violence. His plots are ultimately about the mistake of seeking revenge.

Tulathimutte, who’s forty-one, is one of the foremost fiction writers exploring the subject of his own generation. His characters are so recognizably, painfully millennial because their selfhood is so obviously mediated by the Internet; their instincts are inextricable from their upbringing in an online ecosystem that seizes every individual’s desires and vulnerabilities as fodder for profit and exploitation. In “Private Citizens,” his 2016 début novel, which featured a quartet of lonely and hyper-verbose Stanford graduates struggling to function, the Internet in question was the less-awful Internet of the early Obama era. In “Rejection,” the Internet is the Internet that produced January 6th. The characters in the book are sometimes radicalized politically by all the time they spend online, but, more saliently, the experience deranges their personalities, which grow around the scaffolding of social networks like poisonous vines.

Together, the stories in “Rejection” form a case study in the way that the Internet has both popularized structural language about power and also flattened all sense of proportion, meaning, and historicity. Being online can swiftly amplify a personal feeling of rejection into a world view, a convincing theory that the universe is conspiring to shit specifically on the micro-demographic of you. “Rejection” captures, with alarming fluency, the way that language built for social justice can be easily repurposed. Trained in the jargon of allyship, Craig gains a sophisticated way to convince himself that women have tricked men to become “complicit in our own oppression by pretending it’s not happening or it doesn’t matter.” Alison believes that she’s being progressive when she calls out her friend for having an “Asian child bride” fetish, just because he shows up to drinks with a cute Korean girl named Cece.

Tulathimutte, whose formidable intellect and deviant instincts crackle in nearly every line, has recognized the Internet as the extraordinary repository of character study and self-narration that it is. The language of self-presentation on screens provides constant comedic fodder in “Rejection”—as in real life, the truth about the person who’s typing is often found in the gulf between their life as they see it and the life that others observe. The fourth short story, which starts with “Waddap!” and is written entirely as a Reddit post, is about a nightmare optimization bro, a toxic-positivity dork who uses “10x” as a verb and who assures his audience that he’s made it a “top priority over the years to study modern social behaviors, pop culture, and slang every bit as seriously as I studied Marcus Aurelius and JavaScript.” He explains how he took a girl out for omakase and “helped her appreciate it AF. . . . Doesn’t mindfulness hit so different?” The book’s constant mimicry of disposable digital expression makes for a tonal high-wire act. Sometimes the effort gets too obvious—“Likeeee he’s fine but his pronouns are ho/hum,” one girl writes in a group text. Sometimes, however, it’s perfect, as when Tulathimutte characterizes dating-app messages from “handsome men over fifty” as being like “Hi Alison. Great style. -Mike.”

The characters in “Rejection” do not give and receive touch, and this is part of what draws them, obsessively, to the Internet. Kant, the protagonist of a story titled “Ahegao: Or, the Ballad of Sexual Repression,” is a nerdy Thai American guy afflicted with a “sexual constipation that finds its only release in the fantasy of boundless, monstrous subjugation.” Aroused only by extreme, hyper-specific porn, he suspects that he will never be able to realize his fantasies—that he’s attracted to the “very quality of their nonexistence.” The punch line is that, even in the Pornhub era, Kant’s sexual desires are genuinely, truly beyond the pale, involving images like a penis entering another penis via anal penetration, and protruding tip from tip “like a pig-in-a-blanket.” The fantasy that Kant presents in interminable detail, in the form of an OnlyFans request written as a three-act movie treatment and extended over e-mail after he maxes out the Web site’s character limit, provoked in me the same admiring horror I once felt while watching a thirty-minute YouTube video that imagined the heat death of the universe in time-lapse.

But, despite the best efforts of the characters to disown and ignore their physical forms, their bodies stubbornly reassert their existence. For one character, obsessing about getting laid leads to a medical condition that forecloses the possibility forever. For another, acne “lobed like cauliflower” spreads across her cheeks. Tulathimutte is empathetic toward his characters—he pays closer, more sustained attention to them than anyone else ever has or will—and this sensitivity comes across in his intimate, almost clinical descriptions of the physical sensations of rejection. Alison watches “The Office” while sitting on the toilet; she brings her laptop to bed, “dully prodding herself with her vibrator while watching this prechewed slop.” She cries all the time, and “pictures a calcifying bitterness taking the place of all the emotional fluid she’s losing, like a bean un-soaking.” Tulathimutte writes, about Craig, the virgin fake feminist, “It’s hard to believe chastity was ever associated with purity, when it feels like putrescence, his blood browning, saliva clouding with pus, each passing day rendering him more leprously foul.”

Three of the characters in “Rejection” know they are huge losers. (The other two believe themselves to be world-historical geniuses.) All of them are losers because of their personalities—they have a nuclear inability to simply hang—but they attribute their plight primarily to their identity and appearance. Craig, who’s white, is mad that “having narrow shoulders isn’t on the Official Registry of Politicized Traumas.” Alison believes that she’s been rejected because she’s a “fat white bitch.” Kant, the pig-in-a-blanket fantasist, was tortured in elementary school by white male classmates; though he finds a partner who loves and accepts him, he’s haunted by the gay-dating-app refrain of “no fats femmes Asians,” all categories he fits to some degree.

Tiresome, taxonomic oppression tabulation features heavily in “Private Citizens,” Tulathimutte’s previous book, in which, for example, one character thinks, “Roopa was right, sure; but come on, like a cute skinny desi didn’t have it WAY better than a chubby Jew!” (Another character—another insecure, porn-obsessed Thai American guy—creates a spreadsheet of all his female friends with their various pluses and minuses, and tabulates his own numbers to dismaying results.) Bee, the protagonist of the last long story in “Rejection,” has hated the concept of identity since childhood. She doesn’t understand what being Thai has to do with anything other than her mom “really liking Royal Dansk and the Carpenters.” Alienated from all forms of femininity, ethnicity, sexuality, and ideology, the character, by college, refuses any label or pronoun besides “Bee.”

Bee, like all the characters, accurately observes various mortifying tendencies in smarmy progressive behavior. At Bee’s Stanford co-op, after a girl describes her Vietnamese-American background: “People said Mmm at the phrase ‘refugee family’ like she’d fed them something delicious.” After college, Bee tries to be a normal genderfluid Bay Area person: “Bringing deviled eggs to house parties. Dressing as Judith Butler for Halloween. Parenting succulents.” Bee lives in more co-ops, the kind where if you “asked someone to turn down the music at night, you were entertaining carceral logic.” Finally, Bee has had enough. “Fuck me,” Bee writes, “I just wanted to exist without ordering the prix fixe, be more than an infinitesimal coordinate in a million-dimensional matrix of demographics—identity, and its convenient synergy with personal branding, the caricature of you it puts in other people’s heads.” Bee takes an interest in“identity terrorism,” spending eighteen hours a day operating a Twitter troll farm in the hopes of convincing others that no one can really, truthfully be identified or represented. The conclusion, for Bee, is that most people on the Internet, and perhaps most people everywhere, don’t matter, because they in some way aren’t real.