I’ve been trying to find a way to write about Rejection, a book of linked short stories by Tony Tulathimutte. Since a majority of its protagonists are extremely online, depraved and touch-starved, it’s taken some bitter pill to admit that certain passages felt like an excavation of the shadowy parts of my inner life.
One way to do it would be to take the objective route, to cast the critic’s glassy eye and produce a polished article that puts a professional distance between the reading and the writing. I have some background in this. In 2018-19, I used to review books for a newspaper. Since then, I’ve been through a spectrum of views about book reviewing—derivative; anodyne; not an art; Parul Sehgal elevates it to art; my own talent too limited.
But I had a sudden urge to return to the formal way of doing things because I was stung by a comment (by user “mjc2023”) under a review of Rejection in Vulture magazine:
“....Sure, there are plenty of 40 year olds who can make a good point or two on Substack or in nonfiction, or via a meticulously curated shitposting account, but convincingly smuggling ‘the discourse’ into fiction seems to be a lost art.”
“Who can make a good point or two on a Substack”—this the turn of the knife; it mirrored my nagging thought that Actual Writing (as opposed to Ramblings, Musings, Some Thoughts) is always happening elsewhere.
Rejection is a good instance of this elsewhere. Its pages feel like a shrine to detail, to the thickness and intricacy that separates those who write as a practice and those who write to express themselves. Its virtuoso passages on themes like woke politics, Twitter troll farms and anime-inspired smut (a dizzying 4000-word email to an Only Fans-style creator) induce a trance with a trill as background score—hypnotic in the way the insides of a rotten pomegranate are. The delicacy is in Tulathimutte’s craft, not in his thought, and, from my aspirant’s perch on a lower branch, it feels like such a fulfilling way to go about the work.
The unrelenting and unflinching prose reminded me of a person whose style, at least at first glance, couldn’t be more different: J.M. Coetzee. Where Coetzee deploys spare, uncluttered sentences to plumb the dilemmas and depravities of the human mind, Tulathimutte, a self-confessed veteran of the “Irony v Sincerity Wars of the early aughts” packs his lines with lurid metaphors, succulent adjectives and attention-seeking italics. Different routes to the same destination: self-flagellation and doubt transformed to prose that leaves little to the imagination. Coetzee’s deliverance is in holding back; Tulathimutte atones with excess.
I’ll show (and not just tell) what I mean by excess. Rejection’s world is one where a character’s morning dump is “like a multistage rocket launch, so loud and fervid and aerosol”; where an incel is “not able to get much firmer than an overripe tomato.” This kind of full-bodied writing is interspersed with bangers like “Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure” and “Discourse is loneliness disguised as war.”
There’s also “Love is mutual, which means Alison has never been in love”, which made me sick in the stomach. This is the opening line of ‘Pics’, my favourite story in the collection. Move over, “Call Me Ishmael”. ‘Pics’ traces the gradual unravelling of “fat white bitch” Alison after a friend she sleeps with once displays no interest in encores. The unforgiving ending is a total suckerpunch, and by the time we get there, she has lost much more than the casual cruelty of a group chat and, in a plot device for the fucken ages, a pet raven with “a knife for a face.”
It’s an unhinged story and I would have written it off as far-fetched a few years ago. But I’m 34 now, and more aware of the batshit thoughts loneliness and a lack of self-worth can drive one to. I’m also more familiar with the denouement when millennials realise they are as mediocre and uninteresting as the people they privately shit-talk.
The single story that didn’t work for me is ‘Our Dope Future’, about a slimy Tech Bro whose life is a giant optimisation scheme. If the Tech Bro, who uses words like “algorizzm” and “deadass” without a hint of irony, is meant to be a caricature, it doesn’t quite come through, even accounting for the 30% more selfishness Tulathimutte has mentioned characters need to have for comic purposes.
Perhaps Rejection won’t hit as hard if precious years of your life haven’t been spent online or unpartnered. It really is a book of its time, in the sense that you can get more juice out of its literary investigation of brain rot if you have followed at least one Twitter spat (or e-lafda, as we call it in these parts) from beginning to end. If you’re someone who touches a lot of grass and doesn’t feel like you’ve “never taken the shrink wrap off” your life, I’ll understand if you don’t get my gush. Happy for you, bro. Genuinely.
But me? This kind of made me want to go back to the drawing board and rip up a lot of my published and ongoing work. Some of my stuff feels so cowardly, so tame in a post-Rejection world—dignified characters dancing around homilies, accepting their lot with stoic forbearance, muttering under their breath about the joy of little things.
There’s an interview that Karl Ove Knausgaard gave to The Paris Review in 2013. The final line is him saying “That is writing for me—a cold hand on a warm forehead.” My own writing, I feel, has tried to be the warm hand on a cold forehead, seeking solace, silver linings and slice-of-life authenticity. But there is another way of working, as Tulathimutte shows, where you grab the words and feeling by the scruff instead of caressing them into place.
Apart from the matter of style, Rejection has helped me confirm one thing. It’s only the work that offers a way out of the doubt. I know I want to write to give shape to sensations and feelings, especially the ones between the lines. Talking doesn’t do the shaping in the way writing does. Talk as a way to make sense has its own place, but it is too subject to vagaries of mood, moment and motive.
My inadequacies and doubts are redeemed when I convert them into content, into material, into art, call it what you want as long as I’m satisfied with the output. To strive to delay the demise of life on the sterile page—it is a worthy and hopefully lifelong pursuit.
Sorry to inform you that this is not an 'aspirant’s perch on a lower branch'.
This made me melancholic and somewhat conflicted. Melancholic, because I have been trying to be more analogue (by talking, seeing and meeting people) in making sense of the world, of late. Conflicted, because somehow your words still felt balmy. And finally, I disagree that love is mutual haha.