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inverarityA darkly woke hellscape of sex and dating. Funny, vulgar, clever, and cringey.
William Morrow, 2024, 272 pages
Rejection is a literary collection of interconnected stories about rejection in an era of toxic social media, weaponized wokeness, and people being the same horny apes they have always been. These stories are darkly humorous and very, very online, written by a very online product of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who gets published in places like N+1 and The Paris Review.
My first encounter with Tony Tulathimutte was his short story "The Feminist," published by N+1 magazine, one of those small prestigious NYC literary magazines struggling to survive in the post-print era. You can still read The Feminist online. It anchors Rejection, being the first of seven short stories with interrelated characters. All of the stories are basically about young people dating, trying to navigate sex and relationships and identity, in the post-9/11 proto-woke Social Justice era of the 2010s. It's a very meta book. Tony Tulathimutte has the jargon nailed, the identity and sexual politics emanating from college campuses dialed in and darkly satirized. But it's not mockery so much as meta-commentary. It's not an "anti-Woke" book though you can certainly see wokeness being put under a critical lens, both implicitly and sometimes explicitly, by characters making articulate and clever (in a way real people can never actually talk in real life) arguments and counterarguments that are sometimes sincere, sometimes in screamingly bad faith, outrageous in their audacity, and laugh-out-loud funny. These stories have an edge to them, some end shockingly, and some of them are both gross and depressing, and yet still funny.
"The Feminist," the first story, is on one level about the much-villainized "Nice Guy"/"Male Feminist" of feminist lore, the guy who learned how to say all the right things and be a performative feminist ally but really just wants to get laid. But that's not an entirely fair reading. The Feminist isn't pretending; he really believes! He has completely assimilated the worldview of Intersectional Feminism. He means what he says. Down with the Patriarchy! End Rape Culture! He Checks His Privilege and Respects Women! His problem is that he takes everything he was taught at face value. His earnest attempts to impress women with his feminist bonafides and absolute lack of self-awareness or anything resembling game give women the Ick. He constantly gets friend-zoned, knows that friend-zoning "isn't a thing" and so he has no right to feel sad or entitled about this, yet he just can't figure out what he's doing wrong, and what's a lonely guy to do but become increasingly bitter?
His every encounter is cringeworthy, painful to read. He's both sympathetic and pitiful. Sometimes his observations are valid, and you can understand his growing rage, because he has never come to understand the unspoken rules and double-standards and ego-protecting lies we tell ourselves and each other. But as he goes down the incel rabbithole, until he's become the kind of weird obsessive dweeb who's measuring shoulder-to-waist ratios and sperm motility counts and simultaneously citing his "impeccable feminist credentials" while referring to women as "treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets," it just gets darker and darker until the final line.
"Pics" then does a bit of a switcheroo. Now it's a female incel whose cringeworthy attempts to find love and acceptance take her from slightly bitter and obsessive to a deranged lunatic who blows up her life. Like The Feminist, there's nothing really wrong with her on the surface. She's not hideous, she's not stupid, she's got a job and a life, she just doesn't have a boyfriend, and when her best friend of many years hooks up with her one night, it leads to pathetic desperation and her self-worth goes off a cliff. Like The Feminist (with whom she incidentally hooks up at one point, so you get to see the most awkward, agonizing date-followed-by-really-bad-sex in history told from both perspectives), she just gets worse and worse, until the reader is saying "Oh my God, just stop!" And of course she doesn't, until like the Feminist she has gone beyond the point of no return.
"Ahegao" (don't Google that at work) switches to a gay Asian male protagonist. Like the first two, he's kind of a dweeb with never-fulfilled desires. In his case, he's got deeply deviant, sadistic sexual fetishes that he thinks are just too dark to subject another person to and he's convinced that if he were to ever open up about what he wants, he'd be rejected, shunned, and treated like the disgusting freak he is. So all his relationships are unsatisfactory and unfulfilling, and you feel for the poor guy, except, once again, everything he says and does is so cringe. Eventually, isolated and lonely, he finds an online outlet for his desires, and constructs a fantasy so elaborate and degenerate that reading it is as hilarious as it is horrible. The punchline is a brutal chef's kiss; funny, mean, and awful. I hated this story, and I also laughed out loud.
The remaining stories were not quite as strong, though "Main Character" was pretty good in its spot-on depiction of college students playing power games with identity politics. An alphabet soup of incomprehensible acronyms and pronouns play cutthroat games of More Marginalized Than Thou over the most trivial of issues, entire communities are paralyzed by bad actors who prey on social justice hierarchies, and the Main Character is the amoral, emotionally numb sister of the dude in "Ahegao." She's an asexual Thai-American girl who eschews all identity. She exists in the space between nihilism and wokeness, seeks to be the antithesis of her pervert brother, casually eviscerates The Feminist in one of the little interconnected shoutouts, and eventually enters the darkweb and turns into an Internet supervillain. "Main Character" also gets dark and meta, but it's not quite as funny or absurd as the first three.
"Our Dope Future" was less funny, being a parody of a sociopathic techbro eugenicist redditor. Bro is an Elon Musk wannabe, a tryhard startup founder with a complete lack of self-awareness who utterly destroys first his girlfriend's sense of self and then his own life. While the voice is hilarious and cringey, it went a little too hard into the absurdity of a l33t-talking monster who has no idea he's a monster, until he finally gets a comeuppance of sorts and turns into the frightened little boy he has always been. I mean, it's dark and amusing and clever in a satirical way, but just less funny or deep than the other stories.
"Sixteen metaphors" was just... too meta, and then Tulathimutte goes completely meta with "Re:Rejection" in which he writes a fictional critical rejection essay from a publisher rejecting Rejection. In which he dissects his own stories, himself as an author, and the meta-conceits of the entire collection. "Every thought you had about me, a Thai-American guy with a Stanford education and elite writing workshop cred, writing these stories that scream BIPOC Wokester Millenial from Stanford? Hah, beat you to it, I can mock myself harder than you can, but I'll make you feel cliched and predictable doing it!" he seems to say with a wink. It proves Tulathimutte is a clever, clever guy but it just wasn't as funny as the first part of the book.
Altogether, this is dark humor for the terminally online, for incels or for those who make fun of incels, for those who take social justice politics very, very seriously or for those who mock SJWs. It's a literary millennial "It" author being meta and clever and maybe a wee bit self-indulgent, and if Tulathimutte is sometimes too far up his own ass and sometimes way too vulgar, I'd say the first three stories alone are worth the read, dark and depraved and funny as hell.
My complete list of book reviews.
William Morrow, 2024, 272 pages
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.
Rejection is a literary collection of interconnected stories about rejection in an era of toxic social media, weaponized wokeness, and people being the same horny apes they have always been. These stories are darkly humorous and very, very online, written by a very online product of the Iowa Writers' Workshop who gets published in places like N+1 and The Paris Review.
My first encounter with Tony Tulathimutte was his short story "The Feminist," published by N+1 magazine, one of those small prestigious NYC literary magazines struggling to survive in the post-print era. You can still read The Feminist online. It anchors Rejection, being the first of seven short stories with interrelated characters. All of the stories are basically about young people dating, trying to navigate sex and relationships and identity, in the post-9/11 proto-woke Social Justice era of the 2010s. It's a very meta book. Tony Tulathimutte has the jargon nailed, the identity and sexual politics emanating from college campuses dialed in and darkly satirized. But it's not mockery so much as meta-commentary. It's not an "anti-Woke" book though you can certainly see wokeness being put under a critical lens, both implicitly and sometimes explicitly, by characters making articulate and clever (in a way real people can never actually talk in real life) arguments and counterarguments that are sometimes sincere, sometimes in screamingly bad faith, outrageous in their audacity, and laugh-out-loud funny. These stories have an edge to them, some end shockingly, and some of them are both gross and depressing, and yet still funny.
"The Feminist," the first story, is on one level about the much-villainized "Nice Guy"/"Male Feminist" of feminist lore, the guy who learned how to say all the right things and be a performative feminist ally but really just wants to get laid. But that's not an entirely fair reading. The Feminist isn't pretending; he really believes! He has completely assimilated the worldview of Intersectional Feminism. He means what he says. Down with the Patriarchy! End Rape Culture! He Checks His Privilege and Respects Women! His problem is that he takes everything he was taught at face value. His earnest attempts to impress women with his feminist bonafides and absolute lack of self-awareness or anything resembling game give women the Ick. He constantly gets friend-zoned, knows that friend-zoning "isn't a thing" and so he has no right to feel sad or entitled about this, yet he just can't figure out what he's doing wrong, and what's a lonely guy to do but become increasingly bitter?
His every encounter is cringeworthy, painful to read. He's both sympathetic and pitiful. Sometimes his observations are valid, and you can understand his growing rage, because he has never come to understand the unspoken rules and double-standards and ego-protecting lies we tell ourselves and each other. But as he goes down the incel rabbithole, until he's become the kind of weird obsessive dweeb who's measuring shoulder-to-waist ratios and sperm motility counts and simultaneously citing his "impeccable feminist credentials" while referring to women as "treacherous, evasive, giggling yeastbuckets," it just gets darker and darker until the final line.
"Pics" then does a bit of a switcheroo. Now it's a female incel whose cringeworthy attempts to find love and acceptance take her from slightly bitter and obsessive to a deranged lunatic who blows up her life. Like The Feminist, there's nothing really wrong with her on the surface. She's not hideous, she's not stupid, she's got a job and a life, she just doesn't have a boyfriend, and when her best friend of many years hooks up with her one night, it leads to pathetic desperation and her self-worth goes off a cliff. Like The Feminist (with whom she incidentally hooks up at one point, so you get to see the most awkward, agonizing date-followed-by-really-bad-sex in history told from both perspectives), she just gets worse and worse, until the reader is saying "Oh my God, just stop!" And of course she doesn't, until like the Feminist she has gone beyond the point of no return.
"Ahegao" (don't Google that at work) switches to a gay Asian male protagonist. Like the first two, he's kind of a dweeb with never-fulfilled desires. In his case, he's got deeply deviant, sadistic sexual fetishes that he thinks are just too dark to subject another person to and he's convinced that if he were to ever open up about what he wants, he'd be rejected, shunned, and treated like the disgusting freak he is. So all his relationships are unsatisfactory and unfulfilling, and you feel for the poor guy, except, once again, everything he says and does is so cringe. Eventually, isolated and lonely, he finds an online outlet for his desires, and constructs a fantasy so elaborate and degenerate that reading it is as hilarious as it is horrible. The punchline is a brutal chef's kiss; funny, mean, and awful. I hated this story, and I also laughed out loud.
The remaining stories were not quite as strong, though "Main Character" was pretty good in its spot-on depiction of college students playing power games with identity politics. An alphabet soup of incomprehensible acronyms and pronouns play cutthroat games of More Marginalized Than Thou over the most trivial of issues, entire communities are paralyzed by bad actors who prey on social justice hierarchies, and the Main Character is the amoral, emotionally numb sister of the dude in "Ahegao." She's an asexual Thai-American girl who eschews all identity. She exists in the space between nihilism and wokeness, seeks to be the antithesis of her pervert brother, casually eviscerates The Feminist in one of the little interconnected shoutouts, and eventually enters the darkweb and turns into an Internet supervillain. "Main Character" also gets dark and meta, but it's not quite as funny or absurd as the first three.
"Our Dope Future" was less funny, being a parody of a sociopathic techbro eugenicist redditor. Bro is an Elon Musk wannabe, a tryhard startup founder with a complete lack of self-awareness who utterly destroys first his girlfriend's sense of self and then his own life. While the voice is hilarious and cringey, it went a little too hard into the absurdity of a l33t-talking monster who has no idea he's a monster, until he finally gets a comeuppance of sorts and turns into the frightened little boy he has always been. I mean, it's dark and amusing and clever in a satirical way, but just less funny or deep than the other stories.
"Sixteen metaphors" was just... too meta, and then Tulathimutte goes completely meta with "Re:Rejection" in which he writes a fictional critical rejection essay from a publisher rejecting Rejection. In which he dissects his own stories, himself as an author, and the meta-conceits of the entire collection. "Every thought you had about me, a Thai-American guy with a Stanford education and elite writing workshop cred, writing these stories that scream BIPOC Wokester Millenial from Stanford? Hah, beat you to it, I can mock myself harder than you can, but I'll make you feel cliched and predictable doing it!" he seems to say with a wink. It proves Tulathimutte is a clever, clever guy but it just wasn't as funny as the first part of the book.
Altogether, this is dark humor for the terminally online, for incels or for those who make fun of incels, for those who take social justice politics very, very seriously or for those who mock SJWs. It's a literary millennial "It" author being meta and clever and maybe a wee bit self-indulgent, and if Tulathimutte is sometimes too far up his own ass and sometimes way too vulgar, I'd say the first three stories alone are worth the read, dark and depraved and funny as hell.
My complete list of book reviews.
