“If it were an Instagram friend, I would have unfollowed it,” the New York Times wrote of Rejection, the second fictional outing by writer Tony Tulathimutte. It’s a compendium of five excruciating yet droll short stories, opening with ‘The Feminist’, which n+1 published in 2019 (and subsequently became the magazine’s most-read piece of fiction), chronicling a straight male’s politically correct righteousness that eventually curdles into resentment.
Next there’s the story of Alison, who “suspects the group chat is patronising her” and is plagued by “bad sex with divorced dads and DJs.” Then we meet the newly out Kant, and his agonising attempts to sort through “DataLounge gays and Southern Catholic gays and theory gays, Tumblr tenderqueers and circuit queens and lumbersexual otters, Instagays who complain about getting fat in the captions of objectively stunning thirst traps.” Then there’s Max, a painfully delusional tech bro, whose chapter has echoes of a “Am I The Asshole?” Reddit post. The concluding section follows Bee, an online persona who asserts that “everyone alive is a misrepresentation.”
Cumulatively, the book is a pitiless examination of hypocrisies and self-deceptions, with its interlinked characters staring down the barrel of problematic racial assumptions, thorny gender dynamics, and general human mortification. We caught up with Tulathimutte about reaching beyond binary thinking, the machinations of social performance, and embracing being misinterpreted.
All the characters are connected in some way: did you mastermind the links from the get-go, or were you pulling those threads as you went along?
Tony Tulathimutte: It’s a combination of the approaches. I wrote the first three stories all at the same time. I didn’t really know how they would be connected, but I did know that they were going to fall under the umbrella of a larger project about rejection – that was way back in 2011. I knew that the protagonist of the second story would be his date from the first story, because back then, the really single-celled version of the book was going to be the irony of two people rejecting one another and how it looked, in a kind of Rashomon way, from their different perspectives. After that, I had to look for opportunities to involve the characters in each other’s stories. In some places, I left it open to interpretation. There is a reference to a gay college roommate in the story of ‘The Feminist’ and a gay ex-boyfriend in ‘Pics’. Either one could probably be Kant from the third story.
In ‘The Feminist’, Craig expresses his awareness that his loneliness and sexual frustration are nothing compared with institutional and historical oppression. In ‘Pics’, Alison says that if something is going to knock her so far off course, it should at least be entertaining or make her seem worldly. How would you contextualise personal unhappiness relative to larger-scale suffering in the world?
Tony Tulathimutte: Narratives were originally applied to these grand tasks explaining why we’re here, or what God wants of us. In one of Martin Amis’s novels, The Information, he – or the character – talks about what he calls ‘the history of increasing humiliation.’ The further you go into literary history, the more degraded it gets. There’s this Raymond Carver story I teach called One More Thing with a character named Maxine who states: ‘it’s another tragedy in a long line of low-rent tragedies.’ You hit the 20th century, and these low-rent tragedies are actually much sadder – to be taken down by what you consider a personal tragedy, and then have the superego awareness of the fact that this is not even a nice problem. It’s not dignified the way that a king in a Shakespeare play might be dignified in his downfall. The pain of knowing that one’s problems makes one less dignified, and not more dignified is, to me, doubly tragic.
Nobody wants to give up on love. But rejection is a problem for which there is not really a solution
Alison talks about ethical non-monogamy practitioners being corny, but normative couples being too conventional. Craig feels anxious about not meeting people if he stays in, but if he goes out, he’s just scanning the room the whole time. As Bee put it: ‘the convention sucks, the alternative sucks. What’s the alternative to the alternative?’ Is there an alternative to the alternative? Or are we just stuck with bad options?
Tony Tulathimutte: These situations you’re describing are no-win situations, but they are no-win situations in games that the characters have made for themselves. If there’s one thing they share, it is an unwillingness to shift the parameters of what will constitute happiness or failure for them. In ‘The Feminist’, he gets called out straight to his face: you only will accept love or sex as a sort of validation or vindication, and as long as that’s the case, you’re always going to lose this game that you’re playing. The alternative to the alternative is to chuck the binary out of the window altogether. But nobody is willing to do that, for understandable reasons.
Nobody wants to give up on love. But rejection is a problem for which there is not really a solution. If you’ve narrowed down the scope of your happiness to: I’ll only be happy if this person accepts me – and then they don’t – then there is nothing to be done, right? You can nurture a delusion about, well, if I change in this way, then they will change their mind. It’s usually not the case. The fact that it is not the case makes the problems even more torturous. I was reading a study that said, in a surprising minority of cases, stalkers end up with the people that they have stalked. Hope can spring monstrously eternal this way. Uncertainty is what makes it difficult for people to just let go, but very often that is the only way out.
Alison, in describing the friend who rejected her, said he found ‘an opportunity for him to demonstrate caring, which is not the same as caring.’ This performativity of emotional investment, or allyship, is really scrutinised in the book. Is it possible to be genuine and to connect, or do you feel performativity is just a condition of being part of society?
Tony Tulathimutte: The larger the audience and the more superficial your contact with the audience, the harder that is to pull off. I do think it’s absolutely possible on the scale of knowing people one-on-one, in an intimate setting. It’s just that those opportunities are becoming fewer and fewer. The more that socialising moves online, the more it’s incentivised to put on this performance – until, as Updike says, the ‘mask eats into the face’. I am not going as far as saying it’s impossible. In fact, I think that even when people are trying to perform for others, they can’t help but show their ass, which is where a lot of the comedy in the book comes from.
Winners and losers are both just different sides in the same fucked-up system
The characters’ obsession is finding love. Alison says: ‘love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it somehow feels like a failure.’ Craig acknowledges that he’s old enough to know that relationships don’t guarantee happiness, that the ‘source of his pain is a patriarchal fantasy.’ Yet the fable of finding love is so intrinsic to culture and pop culture. How do you situate romance?
Tony Tulathimutte: It’s not really so much that the characters fall victim to a romance as the extremely narrow model of romance to which they tend to subscribe – that is the thing that is causing the agony. Craig in ‘The Feminist’ is even aware of subscribing to the patriarchal notion of love being granted by a monogamous heterosexual relationship. That’s the only thing that he feels can gratify him. Despite being aware of it, he’s still helpless against it. If had he grown up in a different kind of culture with different expectations, with different esteemed models of love and affection, that might not have been the case. This is not to let him off the hook for what he ends up doing in that story, or what he ends up becoming, but these drives and imperatives get burned into us before we have any say in the matter. They’re symptoms of cultural sickness. The same goes for Alison. It’s perfectly possible to imagine characters finding the right kind of therapist, getting the right social support and then realising I don’t need this extremely specific kind of romance to be fulfilled. I can be my own kind of person, and I can be more self-reliant. But that wouldn’t be very interesting to read.
The oppressive and omnipresent normativity of the couple makes the characters feel like self-reliance is not enough – because it’s not how society is structured, and not being able to fit into that normativity is painful.
Tony Tulathimutte: If you don’t subscribe to it, or if you don’t succeed at it, you’re a loser. This is why I put in Max, because I wanted to reify the alternative here with a character who never gets rejected for anything, and he was extremely successful at the sort of things that culture wants from him to a degree that becomes grotesque by the end of the story. Winners and losers are both just different sides in the same fucked-up system.
The best and worst thing about writing is that you’re designing something that’s open to interpretation
The New York Times made this parallel of you writing about online culture to the way Anthony Bourdain writes about restaurants and Hunter S Thompson writes about motorcycle gangs. Do you feel like that’s apt?
Tony Tulathimutte: There’s a Philip Larkin quote where he said something like ‘deprivation is to me what daffodils were to Wordsworth’. I feel almost the same about rejection – not just about rejection specifically, but a broader feeling of intractable alienation or dispossession. That whatever culture is going to expect of me, it’s either: I’m going to be able to deliver it and be miserable or I’m going to fall short and be miserable. I don’t know if there is a single word for that feeling. I think alienation is a little too broad, but Rejection is just is one of my attempts at getting at that feeling.
Rejection concludes with this acutely self-aware metafictional letter from an editor at a publishing house, shooting down the book the reader has just completed. Can you talk more about ending there?
Tony Tulathimutte: This ties directly back to what we’re talking about earlier with performance. If you’re not performing, if you’re really trying your best to say something real and something that you yourself believes represents the best sides of you, and then it fails, or people don’t like it – that hurts. It hurts even if they do like it but something in the way that they received it results in a misunderstanding. To be misinterpreted, despite your best efforts, it’s like well, I’m glad you liked it, but I don’t think you actually got what I was saying. It’s its own kind of torment.
I’m sort of fond of saying that the best and worst thing about writing is that you’re designing something that’s open to interpretation. Committing to writing a story that permits itself to be misread or to be read in different ways – including conflicting ways – is part of the whole point. It would be heavy-handed to try to control the reading and narrow it down. It would make it less rich. I’ve chosen to err on the side of opening up the possibility to failure as long as there’s also the possibility for people arriving at the same understanding that I do.
The meta-irony of the rejection letter about the book that you’ve just read: it’s the author construct. It’s just another form of kayfabe. It’s not really me. To quote David Lynch – RIP – people always want you to talk about the movie, but the movie is the talking.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is published by 4th Estate on February 13.
