Tony Tulathimutte’s Journey Through Very Online Humiliation

For Tulathimutte’s characters, touching themselves is the human touch of last resort. As Rejection’s title suggests, they are all exiles from what you might call the sexual contract, unable to form lasting romantic connections as a result of personality defects, bizarre proclivities, unrequited attachments, and/or factors outside of their control: Kant, who is Thai American, notes that “every fiftieth profile or so” he comes across on a Grindr-like app contains the phrase “no fats femmes asians, each applying to him in varying degrees.” The humiliations of dating app culture are just one of many ways that digitally mediated life exacerbates their loneliness: Some blame the internet for inculcating their socially unacceptable kinks; others feel alienated by the kind of zero-sum identity politics that flourish on social media. Pretty much every character falls victim at one point or another to the graphomania that constant connectivity encourages, writing texts, posts, or emails that will come back to haunt them.

Private Citizens, which followed four Stanford alumni making their hapless way through mid-aughts San Francisco, also explored themes of tech-enabled depravity, liberal hypocrisy, and sexual failure—Will even maintains a list of the women who have snubbed him, alongside criteria like “approximate date of rejection, and her height, age, race, ethnicity, and estimates of income, weight, IQ.” But Tulathimutte’s debut novel was more kaleidoscopic, a send-up of millennial pathologies that also took aim at reality TV, New Age management seminars, plastic surgery, hipster self-hatred, and venture capitalism, among many other targets. In Rejection, he narrows his scope, offering a series of variations on foiled desire, like movements in a perverted symphony. Until, that is, a belated turn reveals the book is concerned not only with Very Online sexual frustration, but with the plight of the author in the internet age.

“The Feminist,” Rejection’s opener, establishes a template that many of its subsequent stories will follow. Narrated in a circumlocutory close third person—Tulathimutte rarely uses one word where three will do—it follows an alternately pitiable and repellant subject on his path from hopeful attempts at love to aggrieved acceptance of solitude. The eponymous feminist is a cis, straight, white man whose progressive education has taught him to disavow the source of his own invisible oppression (narrow shoulders). His online dating profile signals his disdain for the “imperialist male supremacist hetero patriarchy,” and his friends are mostly women, in part because “the women he tries to date offer him friendship instead.” While he respects their autonomy, he imagines their attraction to assholes is a form of false consciousness. Like many of Rejection’s characters, his self-obsession rarely converts into self-awareness.