A Review of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection: Fiction (William Morrow, 2024)

[uttararangarajan]

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Well, Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection: Fiction (William Morrow, 2024) is my doozy read for this year. This one was probably too much for me, but I’m glad I read it. It’s gotten a lot of buzz as a collection that squarely deals with incel culture. Let’s go on to that ever-important marketing description: ““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.”

 

 I love linked story collections, so I hope that I found all the basic links, but the kind that Tulathimutte has written is my favorite: characters in one story sometimes return in another. What I adore about this approach is that you get a more kaleidoscopic view of a given character. Of course, Tulathimutte increases the cohesion of this fragmented narrative through the rubric of rejection. The challenge for readers of this work emerges in the tone as well as the content. It is highly satirical and potentially comic, but it is advanced through and by the complications of dating and erotic attraction and all the messiness that that can sometimes entail. There were points where I did think that the narrative went a little bit too far, but satire is that thing of taste. What one person considers funny or critical another might find too much or just not humorous. I did really enjoy the last story, which is essentially a meta-epistolary story from an editor to the fictive character Tony, who has had his manuscript rejected. Here, the editor essentially engages in a kind of analysis of the pitfalls of Tulathimutte’s previous stories, ultimately castigating fictive Tony for being too obfuscating. The real author Tulathimutte might be heading off at the pass the ways in which satire can leave readers without a firm positionality of social critique to stand on, but I still found enjoyed it, partly because it hews closest to popular literary criticism. I’m sure this collection will get critical attention from scholars, as the meta dynamics are reminiscent of the best in this genre (see, for instance, Nam Le’s first story from The Boat). Like I said: the doozy read of the year.

 

Buy the Book Here