Rejection
by Tony Tulathimutte
William Morrow, 272 pp., $28
IT IS THE CURSE OF THE ELDER MILLENNIAL to recall, from your own youth, the era in which the internet was still good. Used to be, you could check your email at one of the computer stations after class, go about your day, then head back home and go to your room to watch Homestar Runner and read the latest comments on Television Without Pity. And then you logged off! You stepped away from the computer and played frisbee with your friends! The internet, like Goldilocks’s porridge, was just right.1
No longer, though. The internet has grown worse since then, and it has also grown much, much larger. It is everywhere—omnipresent to the point of invasion. Our phones siphon our personal information like vagrants siphoning gasoline from parked cars. Our dopamine receptors are constantly engorged on neurological candy; we read articles about how to treat “tech neck.” We know it’s bad, and yet we keep logging on and hunching over, for more and more hours each day. We ruin ourselves in the process, and one of the great mysteries is that some of us seem to do it downright enthusiastically.
This is the world Tony Tulathimutte portrays in his new work of fiction, Rejection. A collection of overlapping stories that coheres into a novel, Rejection presents us with a suite of characters whose emotional lives have become parasitic upon the internet. There are incels and shut-ins to be found here, yes, but there are also characters pursuing relationships in almost normal-seeming ways. They, too, can’t help but interact with the world through the tappy window that is constantly in their hands. I mean, how else are they supposed to meet anyone? It’s where we all are.
THE FIRST STORY IN REJECTION, “The Feminist,” appeared in n+1 in 2019. The moment it hit the digital public square—Twitter, back then—it caused a (mostly) happy uproar, the kind we’d last witnessed when Kristen Roupenian’s “Cat Person” appeared in the New Yorker two years earlier. The reaction made sense. “The Feminist” operates as a response to “Cat Person”—a dispatch from the other side of the gender wars. Roupenian’s story suggests that straight men, however kind they might seem, are monsters who might show their true face at a moment’s notice. Tulathimutte’s story suggests that any attempt to be kind to those men can become itself the catalyst that triggers their transformation, like letting a gremlin eat after midnight.
The titular feminist is a young man who’s done his homework—gender studies homework, that is. He’s read Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, bell hooks, all as part of an effort to become a better, truer ally to the women in his life. Yet the women in his life are somewhat less appreciative of this than he wishes for them to be. Try as he might, he cannot get any of the women in his circle to see him as a romantic prospect. Has he done something wrong? Has he failed to read the right books? As he grows older, working a decent-paying tech job in the city, he remains locked in the friendzone. He finds freedom online through forums he begins to visit; they give him new language to describe his situation. He feels he has been passed over for romantic affection, with no regard for his virtues, in favor of more stereotypically masculine men—the very sort of dude that women are supposed to find regressive, according to his readings in feminism. Yet women seem to fall for these guys again and again. What gives?
You see where this is going. The feminist eventually completes his transformation into another shibboleth: an incel. He embraces an inner rage at women everywhere for denying him his self-evident right to love and sex. Violence ensues.
Did I mention that all of this is very funny? Tulathimutte dials up the tension of identity-speak to levels of cringe that recall Ricky Gervais on The Office. “They’re saying he can’t express his feelings because worse things happen? By that logic, he could say that their stupid anxieties about dating bi women aren’t important because they’re not being rounded up and thrown off rooftops like queer people in, for example, Syria. But he wouldn’t say that to his QPOC friend! He would listen!” I’m cringing, you’re cringing. But I was also smiling. The precise mix of vicarious embarrassment and amusement had me reading the page through my fingers, as if I were watching a horror movie.
This being the first story, readers might expect that the whole book goes this way, adding up to a composite portrait of male rage. But Thulatimutte is up to something far more interesting than that, and his goal is even a bit counterintuitive. “Pics,” the second story, is about a well-adjusted young woman who enjoys a media job in New York, a lively circle of friends, and romantic prospects. Yet she, too, is pulled into the lower darkness by her phone. When her kinda-sorta boyfriend takes a picture of her during an intimate moment, she becomes obsessed with the image—with its existence, and with what it says or doesn’t say about the nature of their relationship. Like the male feminist, she alienates her friends, and they raise against her the honed weapons of identity politics and self-care. We’d take her for the mirror opposite of the incel, but she winds up just as lonely as he is nonetheless.
The humiliations continue. “Our Dope Future” recounts the saga of a tech-bro who attempts to “hack” every aspect of a romantic relationship to achieve a vision of personal success that includes fabulous wealth and a teeming brood of children. The language of his heart is the patois of hyper-online culture; more cringes are in store for readers who reach his “proposal” to his partner: “I freaks with you heavy, and that is no cap whatsoever. As long as you make this one promise: Will you work together with me as a team to pursue our life goals, deadass?” As Elon Musk has shown us, there is little that is less funny than this.
On the subject of Musk, and the social media platform he took over a couple years ago: “Main Character” is a bravura novella about a mysterious persona known only as “Bee.” Bee is a kind of all-purpose antagonist hovering at the edges of the whole book, creating Twitter accounts and bots that harass the main characters of other stories until they start believing themselves to be hopeless, loveless, lifeless. Bee is the Mozart of misanthropy, and Twitter is their orchestra. “Main Character” illuminates Twitter, the experience of using the site regularly and being remade by it, better than anything else I’ve read. Yet its success raises a question. If Rejection is fundamentally satire, then what is it satirizing? You? Me? All of us?
REJECTION WAS PUBLISHED on September 17, 2024. It is tempting to describe the book, with its sendups of the excesses of “woke” culture, as anticipating, welcoming, even contributing to the dreaded “vibe shift” that delivered Trump the White House weeks later. But Thulatimutte has aimed at—and achieved—something very different with Rejection. He is not some podcaster exhorting young men to stop eating bugs and flee the longhouse. He is satirizing the left-ish coastal world he knows so well not in renunciation, but out of a sense of faith—faith that his readers in Brooklyn, Berkeley, and Portland can, like any good audience, hear his jokes as ones they can share with him, because they see, understand, and live with the same absurdities he does. This is fiction that has not surrendered its humanism to an ideological purpose—a feature that gives the novel an oddly encouraging quality, even for those whose backgrounds are different enough from Tulathimutte’s that they might be tempted to read his fiction for social information about a different cultural world. He’ll give them a bit of that, certainly, but he has richer and more complex things to offer, too.
All of this helps make clear how vital it is that Rejection is a novel, specifically—not a podcast, not a standup special, not a 3-hour YouTube storytelling project, but a novel, one that depicts Tulathimutte’s characters enduring one internet-borne humiliation after another. The truth that elder millennials like Tulathimutte know firsthand is that scaling up a narrative to reach ever greater audiences, as other media are better suited to doing, entails a loss of the local, the niche, the immediately personal. What’s more, they haven’t forgotten that some stories are best exchanged at that lower level. The internet was at its best when it was populated exclusively by lonely teenagers posting emo lyrics on message boards for friends they knew primarily in the offline world.
The internet will never be that again, of course. But this novel recalls the sense I remember of being on the same page in the earliest days of being online—of laughing at the same joke.
And what is the joke, exactly? In Rejection, the joke is desire, and we play it on ourselves, constantly. Admitting what we want can be an extraordinarily humiliating affair. (Life itself can be described in similar terms.) In one story from Rejection, a character composes an extremely NSFW sexual fantasy in order to pass it to a content creator to reproduce it. But thanks to a fat-finger mishap, the poor kinky guy sends his vivid fantasy out not only to the content creator, but to everyone in his address book. Imagine, building up the courage to admit what he wants, only to become the butt of jokes told the world over.
Poor guy—he should have written a novel.