Tony Tulathimutte, _Rejection_

LAST MONTH, THE New York Times ran an article about "performative feminism," that is, young(ish) men who know their way around the discourse and cultural codes of feminism, but who have acquired these skills mainly in the interest of getting dates. The story, much to my surprise, did not so much as mention Tony Tulathimutte's short story "The Feminist," which is a cringe-inducing portrait of exactly such a character. The story ran in n+1 way back in 2019, and had a lot of readers at the time, so Im not sure why the Times writers did not give it a nod. 

Maybe the omission is weirdly à propos, though, since "The Feminist" is the lead story in this 2024 collection called Rejection, in which every story is about being the one who does not get picked, chosen, elected, noticed, mentioned, etc. The performative feminism strategy of the protagonist of "The Feminist," for instance, backfires spectacularly over and over again, and in the story's final sentence he seems to have drifted into the toxic precincts of incel-dom.

Tulathimutte's skill in presenting these...I guess I have to call them rejects, grim as it is...is so compelling that the book can be hard to stay with. You keep wishing you could tell a character, wait a minute, don't hit "send" on that one, but they always do, with catastrophic results. Part of you wants to quit reading, but there you are, driving slowly past the pileup, rubbernecking.

What I most enjoyed, though, and a good reason to keep going through cringe after cringe, is that the collection has not only thematic coherence, but some surprising internal connections that make it an unconventional kind of novel. Alison, the protagonist of "Pics," may be spending time with the protagonist of "The Feminist" while she tries to get over being  rejected by Neil, and then later winds up having to break loose from Max, the insufferable narrator of "Our Dope Future." Kant, the protagonist of "Ahegao, or the Ballad of Sexual Repression," is the brother of Bee, author of  the epic post that accounts for most of the pages of "Main Character," and the Craig that Bee at one point has to fend off may be the narrator of "The Feminist." The stories add up to a portrait of a generation that grew up online. An unflattering portrait, but, well.

The final text in the book is a publisher's letter to Tulathimutte rejecting Rejection. This letter must be Tulathimutte's own work, since the publisher's greatest objection to Rejection is the inclusion in the book of the rejection letter itself. Not everyone likes this kind of Borgesian metafictional move, but I do.