A male feminist pushed too far. A couple of friends hook-up, destroying one of the friend’s lives. A closeted man represses his very strange fantasies from everyone - until he doesn’t. A hyper-driven type A personality’s bizarre life goal clashes with his girlfriend’s. An identity-obsessed individual changes the internet. And presiding over all of it is Tony Tulathimutte (hereafter referred to as TT), a writer and potential character/s in the novel Rejection.
I heard nothing but good things about TT’s novel Rejection from across the pond last year so I was hyped for this one - and pleasantly surprised that it lived up to it. A wry look at modern digital lives: the loner incel shut-ins who live online, the simps, the entrepreneurs who make unnecessary start-ups, the casualties of toxic group chats and doom-scrolling social media - I’ve been waiting for someone to write about life right now and not life in the near to distant past or future, and TT is the dude who stepped up and wrote a great novel about it too.
The chapters are titled rather than numbered and, as each one features a different character, the book has the appearance of a short story collection rather than a novel. But, as you read on, you notice characters from previous stories reappear and events overlap - the hapless Alison veers from one disastrous relationship to another in both Pics and Our Dope Future, while Ahegao or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression features Kant and Main Character features his little sister Bee, which is also the story where we get the name of the male feminist character in The Feminist.
The Feminist is a really funny start to the novel. An extreme example of modern male feminism, wherein the ultra-PC main character can’t find a girlfriend, it was like an extended Portlandia sketch. Pics was my favourite chapter with the best character, Alison. She hooks up with her friend Neil and completely falls for him - he meanwhile only viewed it as a one-time thing and quickly distances himself, leading to Alison’s dramatic spiral over the course of a year. The disintegration of her “friend” group chat was especially brilliant, all presented like a WhatsApp convo.
Ahegao or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression was the first story that I found easy to put down. Kant struggles to make himself vulnerable enough to express what he wants from his sexual partners, leading him to seek fulfilment with strangers online. I didn’t need to read 15 pages (way too long) of his very graphic, very bizarre fetish but the ending was funny.
The main character’s voice of Our Dope Future was brilliant. He’s a clueless home-schooled madman who thinks, because he obsessively studied slang, that his incorporation of it in his everyday speech makes him seem normal and it’s completely the opposite! Alison turns out to be his latest girlfriend and the poor woman can’t catch a break as their relationship gets weirder the more he tries to mould her to his insane worldview.
Main Character is about Kant’s little sister, Bee, who’s obsessed with identity. I get that this is a subject that’s easily mockable - and has been, thoroughly, by many - and deservedly so; I couldn’t care less about a person’s pronouns and people who do are always the most tedious cretins you’d never want to encounter in any sphere. Which is why extended scenes discussing this drivel, while clearly satirical, bored me quite a bit. I couldn’t have predicted where it was all headed though and thought TT’s storytelling was very imaginative, very meta, and gave the whole novel another dimension of interpretation that was really creative and clever.
As inspired as Rejection is, TT flounders a bit to wrap things up. Sixteen Metaphors was an odd penultimate chapter that felt unnecessary, and TT closes out with Re: Rejection, where a fictional publisher rejects TT’s manuscript. It seemed like TT wasn’t quite sure how to end things and went one meta step too far. It’s an underwhelming and unsatisfying closer to what was otherwise an often impressive novel. I would’ve preferred if TT had returned to where he left the feminist at the end of his first chapter, giving the novel overall a Pulp Fiction-style arc, and go out with a bombastic finale instead of this overly cerebral shrug of an ending.
Despite these minor flaws, Rejection is a really great novel. Through stories surrounding the theme of rejection, it engages with contemporary culture in a way that’s both intelligent and entertaining, making it a fresh, vital and original work of art. TT is a virtuoso prose stylist - the sentences and lexicon are impeccably presented and chosen - and yet the novel is also accessible for all readers. Eminently readable and thoughtful, Rejection is one of the best novels of the year and with it Tony Tulathimutte emerges as a promisingly noteworthy author to follow.
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