If Tony Tulathimutte’s new book, a collection of linked stories titled “Rejection,” were a futuristic pop-up book, up would jump unflattering sex pics, medicine for cauliflower acne, unreturned texts, hateful pet birds, the Stanford alumni magazine, terrible food, the odors of crotches and armpits, semi-satirical Judith Butler Halloween costumes and holograms of “friends” who are either poseurs or users or toxic grievance collectors.
This book is so cold and lonely you could hang meat in it. “Rejection” is not an ironic title. Elizabeth Hardwick wrote that poverty, in the form of multiple occupancy, has “a marigold odor.” Does abjection have a smell? If so, add it to the list above.
Tulathimutte’s characters are shoe gazers. They’re snails that have been emotionally salted. His subject is not fashionable ennui. He is writing about alienation and skin starvation, a longing for the nonexistent touches of friends and the embraces of lovers.
These young men and women are mostly short and unattractive; they have large pores and clerkly physiques and may be balding. They are losers in the great American popularity contest. They’ve been cut from the herd. Neither the sheep nor the goats want them.
No one here gets out alive — if soul murder counts.
I read “Rejection” during a week when I felt down, and it almost stubbed me out, like a cigarette. If it were an Instagram friend, I would have unfollowed it. But Tulathimutte is such an acutely observant writer that I was entranced by his book despite its narrowness and emotional barbarity.
One of Tulathimutte’s primal topics is online culture and its diseased repercussions, and he writes about these things in the way Anthony Bourdain wrote about restaurants, Hunter S. Thompson wrote about motorcycle gangs and Molly Ivins wrote about water-headed Texas politicians. He’s alert, in other words; he’s tanked up, bleakly funny and always stropping his knife.
This is his second book, after the well-received novel “Private Citizens” (2016), which was about four damaged and estranged Stanford graduates trying to twig together lives for themselves in San Francisco. (None is unaware of “the obscene entitlement of a Stanford degree.”) That earlier novel has similar themes. Sample sentence: “His loneliness was ambidextrous and trilingual and weighed 600 pounds.”
“Rejection” is harder to quote from. Few of the best sentences can be printed in this newspaper. That’s because of the profanities, sure, but also because Tulathimutte pays rapt attention to what George Orwell called “the WC and dirty-handkerchief side of life.”
As I scrolled along, however, I imagined some of the lines being uttered by a character in a square-paneled Jules Feiffer cartoon. Example A: “I’ve always believed that microaggressions warrant microapologies.” Example B: “Twitter was the right word for it, birdsong being a Darwinian squall mistaken for idle chatter, screaming for territory and mates.”
There are five stories in “Rejection,” if you don’t count a short, awkward section called “16 Metaphors” and a more awkward metafictional letter from an editor at a publishing house, rejecting the book we’ve just read.
One story is about an unattractive, narrow-shouldered young man who is “dragging his virginity like a body bag into his mid-20s.” He’s a cheerleader for feminism — he has never catcalled or mansplained, he marches for women’s rights — and he can’t figure out why women put him in the friend zone and then drop him altogether. The story gets dark and then darker. You feel you’re watching one of those reverse animal rescue videos.
Another is about an overweight, friendless young woman who is not paranoid — people do hate her. She once participated in group texts that were a “validation cartel.” Now the members bicker like Baader-Meinhof splinter cells. The woman’s life feels like “slow nonlethal drowning.” Even her bowel movements destroy her (and us), one of them being “like a multistage rocket launch, so loud and fervid and aerosol that to psychically recover afterward she takes a 15-minute shower and buys some white linen sheets online.”
The best story here, which I will never forget, is called “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression.” It’s about a young man named Kant who was viciously bullied when he was young. Now he’s a “stammering moon-faced pornsick Asian virgin in his 30s” who mostly plays video games and masturbates. His soul has been through a blitzing machine. No one wants him sexually, and he gets that all too well — he only likes buff, handsome guys too.
I’ll never forget “Ahegao” because of a scene in which Kant arrives at a grim, grim, grim house in the weedy suburbs, after working up the nerve to arrange a hookup on an all-male dating app. Out front, “a Mayor McCheese merry-go-round, clearly expropriated from a McDonald’s playground, lies next to a tree in the overgrown front yard. Only one light is on inside the house and it’s blue.”
Don’t go in, Kant. Jeffrey Dahmer alert. He goes in.
This story also contains what is probably the most elaborate sex fantasy I’ve heard described in fiction (apologies to Nicholson Baker), one that Kant pays more than $8,000 to have an actor stage on video so that he can watch and rewatch it. How elaborate? The “phallothermic energy” that his member radiates will reverse climate change, and “my individual spermatozoa are so tall and charismatic that they’re elected to lead the G8 nations.” That’s not the half of it. This story’s ending is too wrenching to give away.
In other stories, Tulathimutte writes about identity politics. One young Asian American woman becomes an outsider among her housemates because she rejects what she calls “identity terrorism” and declares, “I don’t get what’s right about constructing your selfhood around oppression.” Tulathimutte’s writing about these matters is sophisticated, circumspect, impossible to pin down. He’s an elusive anatomist of culture-war provocations.
Even the losers get lucky sometimes, Tom Petty advised us. Not here. In the end, everything in “Rejection” is stripped bare. This book is not for everyone. I’m not sure it’s for me. But I’ve scraped myself up off the floor to be able to write: Tulathimutte is a big talent and he is clearly just getting started.
The post Even Losers Get Lucky Sometimes. Not in This Book. appeared first on New York Times.