Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte: book review
Overview: This book is technically a short story collection in the sense that it's made up of seven standalone stories, but it is unique in the sense that they're mostly interconnected. Characters from one story hop into another and weave into other pieces of the narrative. So there's an impression here that becomes larger than what a conventional short story collection conveys. The themes of this book are all united around the concept of rejection. It starts with the most expected of the possible stories and becomes progressively more unhinged and meta as it progresses. While there are some pieces I couldn't help but skim, it did pose some interesting questions. Overall: 4
The Feminist: This story was interesting enough. It felt expected in a lot of ways as it's centered on an intellectual, self professed liberal feminist white man. He's never had any luck with dating despite having tons of female friends, and it charts the unraveling of his general sanity and life as the years go on without him finding any romantic success. It's the story I most expected to find here, that classic development of an incel pattern, but while I thought the story was fine, I struggled to find a real sense of depth here or something that really hooked me in.
Pics: This felt like the female flip-side to the first story. The girl gets rejected by her best friend who doesn't want a relationship after they hook up once. This starts a deep spiral that brings out the utter worst in her leading to a blown up friend group chat and her acquiring a pet raven. Again, this story was fine. It plays on tropes and identities present in the modern world but rarely addressed, but I still struggled to find the necessary depth.
Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression: Kant's story is the most overtly sexually driven of the collection. Kant has known that he was into domination even before he fully knew he was gay. But he has a lot of shame around this, which has left him stunted. The story chronicles his childhood into his first real relationship and how it crumbles. It ends with Kant's investment of a massive sum of money into custom porn and the extremely detailed fantasy he wants played out. This email describing what he wanted in the custom video goes on for pages and pages in extreme detail. I get the direction this story wanted to go, and I respect it, but this email to the sex worker just goes on for too long. I skimmed, I'll admit it. I didn't feel the need to read all of it once I got the gist. While I didn't love this story and felt like the pacing was off, I do like the mirrored bookend of how the story opens and closes.
Our Dope Future: Written in the style of the reddit AITA post, this story takes on another ridiculous man a sort of Musk-like tech-finance-bro that is truly insufferable on so many levels. The post tells the story of this man's encounter with the protagonist from "Pics" who is now much more sympathetic as a girl held captive in his strange bro world. I liked the framing of this as a post that then got edited multiple times as he defended himself. The ultimate ending felt like a stretch, and it, like most of the stories, went on too long, but I liked the direct introduction of internet culture that set the tone for the last few stories that go very deep into the online world.
Main Character: This was definitely my favorite of the stories. It picks up with Kant's sibling Bee. The story is written as a confessional about internet trolling by Bee that's shrouded in all the twists and turns and uncertainty of any good internet conspiracy. But it also takes on really directly how feeling rejected by the people around you leads to loneliness, and how in this day and age, loneliness leads to the deep dark pit of the internet where you can convalesce with all the other lonely people who have entirely disconnected from the tangible world around them. I hate admitting it because all of these stories are ugly and unflattering, but here, I did empathize with Bee. Looking back, I can see my teenage years that I spent fully plugged into online fandom were not good or healthy or any of the other positive things I attributed to the internet at the time as a very lonely isolated teenager. I never ended up tipping into any kind of extreme with it, but it's given me an acute awareness of how easy it is to fall into an internet pit. I was lucky that I didn't find anything more dangerous than the toxicity of pop star fandoms. While there's a satirical edge to all of these stories and some of them cross into even making fun of their ridiculous characters, this is the story that has the most genuine heart baked into it, which does make a difference.
The appendix to the story goes on to give a super meta twist that foreshadows what's to come with the last stories.
Sixteen Metaphors: I liked this little interlude. There's a lot of dating and other random metaphors twisted to show the frustration of being... here's one I'm picking on my own... always the bridesmaid and never the bride. After such long stories, these little bites are a relief.
Re: Rejection: It doesn't get more meta than ending the book with a fake rejection letter critiquing all of the stories in the book, rejecting the project, even acknowledging that the version of the book the letter evaluates has this rejection letter. The most amusing part is that it gives valid critiques of the stories, ones I agree with to some extent for some of the stories. This might actually be the most interesting piece of writing in the collection and gives it all a mark of intentionality that casts it into a better concluding light.
Final Thoughts: If nothing else, it's clear Tony is trying very hard with this work, trying hard to be innovative or different. There's only so many ways to reinvent the wheel with short stories, and he plays with many variations on form. This is a highly online book and while not my favorite (I prefer work like I'm a Fan in this vein) it's an interesting effort. It succeeded in making me uncomfortable, at making me confront how the internet has truly warped all of our brains and human interactions and expectations (albeit, hopefully, on average in less extreme ways than these amped up characters). I'm glad I read it. There's a heartbeat, a heavy undertow, that's lacking here, but it's short enough to survive without it.
Reading this will make you understand why they stuck the word fiction prominently in the middle of the cover.
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