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Fiction
by Tony Tulathimutte
Book Reviewed by:From the Whiting and O. Henry–winning author of Private Citizens ("the first great millennial novel," New York Magazine), an electrifying novel-in-stories that follows a cast of intricately linked characters as rejection throws their lives and relationships into chaos.
Sharply observant and outrageously funny, Rejection is a provocative plunge into the touchiest problems of modern life. The seven connected stories seamlessly transition between the personal crises of a complex ensemble and the comic tragedies of sex, relationships, identity, and the internet.
In "The Feminist," a young man's passionate allyship turns to furious nihilism as he realizes, over thirty lonely years, that it isn't getting him laid. A young woman's unrequited crush in "Pics" spirals into borderline obsession and the systematic destruction of her sense of self. And in "Ahegao; or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression," a shy late bloomer's flailing efforts at a first relationship leads to a life-upending mistake. As the characters pop up in each other's dating apps and social media feeds, or meet in dimly lit bars and bedrooms, they reveal the ways our delusions can warp our desire for connection.
These brilliant satires explore the underrated sorrows of rejection with the authority of a modern classic and the manic intensity of a manifesto. Audacious and unforgettable, Rejection is a stunning mosaic that redefines what it means to be rejected by lovers, friends, society, and oneself.
The Feminist
If you ask him where he went to high school, he likes to boast that, actually, he went to an all-girls school. Which is sort of true—he was one of five males at a progressive private school that had gone co-ed just before he'd enrolled. People always reply: Ooh la la, lucky guy! You must've had your pick. Which irritates him, because it implies that women would only date him if they had few other options, and also because he hadn't dated anyone in high school. (In junior year a freshman girl had a crush on him, but he wasn't attracted to her curvaceous body type, so he felt justified in rejecting her, as he'd been rejected many times himself.)
Still, the school ingrained in him, if not feminist values per se, the value of feminist values. It had been cool, or at least normal, to identify as asexual. And though he didn't, he figured it was a better label than "virgin." His friends, mostly female, told him he was refreshingly attentive and trustworthy for a boy. ...
While some stories are more dynamic and some characters more compelling than others, the collection is uniformly hilarious and Tulathimutte exhibits exceptional powers of description. The male feminist discovers an online community with whom he identifies — those "willing to declare unapologetically that narrow-shouldered feminist men are the most oppressed subaltern group." Alison of the one-night stand adopts a raven, which "turns out to be a flesh-ripping fiend with a knife for a face" that "smells like soiled hospital clothes" and survives on a diet of "wet microwaved rats." The author cleverly ends the collection with a story called "Rejection," which feigns to be a letter from a publisher rejecting the manuscript that has become the very book the reader holds in their hands. It is a winding exercise in self-referential and self-deprecating humor but it also astutely explores the discomfort surrounding author intention that readers might feel after engaging with these stories. To what degree are we supposed to feel empathy toward these characters? To what degree are we meant to simply laugh at their failures and fates?..continued
Full Review
(723 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
Alissa Nutting, author of Made for Love and Tampa
The stories in Rejection ring with audacity like a siren. The characters within are deliriously shocking, toxic, transgressive, but due to Tulathimutte's extraordinary talents, the most frightening moments in the collection—those which make this book feel truly dangerous—are those of empathy. It's this vertiginous event, feeling like I'm leering on from behind the safety of a glass wall, savoring the thrill of moving in for a far closer peek than I'd ever dare in the wild, then suddenly realizing I'm the one behind the glass, a complicit specimen who's just been collected via the author's mastery that will have me reading and rereading this book until I die or can no longer stand it. Tulathimutte is peerless. Jenny Zhang, author of Sour Heart
From the opening sentence of Rejection, I was cannonballed into the twisted, obscene, pleasurable world of pure genius. It's actually sick how Tony Tulathimutte has managed to make his prodigious, byzantine mind so compulsively readable and immaculately accessible, not to mention how, again and again, his deranged humor crosses over the threshold of the ordinary and into the astral realm. Read this book and you too will develop a fetish and taste for Tulathimutte's gift for satire and insight into the human condition. You'll never read a book like this again. Vauhini Vara, Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of The Immortal King Rao
I could compare Rejection to the work of Nabokov, in its stylish and blazingly original skewering of convention; or to that of Roth, in the daring with which it plumbs the darkest depths of the human psyche to excavate what is most vulnerable about us; or to the worst (by which I mean best) Am I the Asshole post you've ever read on Reddit, in its commitment to embodying its characters at their neediest and most candid and therefore most delectable. But to do so would be to sell it short. I finished Rejection breathless with admiration. It is — Tulathimutte is — that rare thing in American literature: truly original.
The final, titular story of Tony Tulathimutte's collection Rejection is styled as a letter from a publisher explaining to the author why they will not be publishing the book. This form is used as a means of exploring the stories within from the perspective of a potential critic, and is used to humorous effect as the author considers his own biases and motivations for writing what he did.
Virtually every author has dealt with rejection from a publisher. Famously, it takes a long time to find the right home for a book, and that path is frequently paved with "no"s. But rejection is often less about a piece of writing not being good enough and more about an individual publisher or editor's particular taste and needs.
In a 2019 ...
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