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In 2019, the Brooklyn-based literary magazine n+1 published a short story that went viral. Titled The Feminist, it follows the life of a man who turns from a bell hooks-reading Supporter of Women into a bitter moderator in an online forum about how feminism is a cancer. Rejection has hardened him over the years. In university, he always supported his friends – predominantly women – throughout their emotional crises, and was surprised to discover that his attentiveness was not rewarded with love or sex. After university, his online dates ghost him. He fears the nerves of his penis have been dulled by vigorous masturbation. The Feminist satirised in witty and lurid detail a familiar type in the online zeitgeist: the staunch male ally, emerging out of the political currents of #MeToo and the movement against Trump. The more vocal they were, the more people began to wonder what they were trying to hide.
Now, half a decade later, The Feminist and six other short stories have been gathered in an interlinked collection. I had enjoyed The Feminist when it was first published, but wondered how it would read today, when the earnest #Resistance rhetoric of the late 2010s internet has morphed into something more anarchic, and the dominant pose of online masculinity is not one of unearned sanctimony. The Feminist now feels like a prescient prequel to our current moment, while Rejection’s other stories take aim at wider subjects, following a range of characters: a woman who self-destructs after being romantically rejected; a man who comes out as gay, but really it’s his sadism he’s reckoning with; a disaffected Twitter addict who refuses all attempts to define them according to race, gender, and sexuality: they want to live beyond identity, that tiresome predominant organising category of our era. What these characters share is a basic inability to exist in the world, which to them is a dishonest place governed by stupid yet mysterious codes, populated by hypocritical idiots. “Love is not an accomplishment,” one character observes, summing up a key tenet of the book, “yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure.”
What makes the stories so readable – what made The Feminist such a hit – is Tulathimutte’s magnetic prose, at once entertaining and acute. “Twitter,” one character observes of the website now known as X, “was the right word for it, birdsong being a Darwinian squall mistaken for idle chatter.” Few of the staple features of fiction are found in these stories. There is hardly any description of external settings; the characters routinely refuse any opportunity for growth; time passes quickly and insignificantly in their lives, liquid and unreal. In fact, Rejection feels like being inside the internet. At times it mimics the language of twentysomething online spaces (of a disappointing man: “we hate him now yes? typical venus in sag”). More broadly, the stories capture the spirit of our doomscrolling age: the paranoia, the dread, the defensiveness and resentment that has curdled into political death spirals everywhere. There is something cleansing about being confronted with these realities. One dissenter in The Feminist’s online forum declares: “This place is like staring into a cursed mirror where the longer you stare at it the uglier you get”. Reading Rejection is similarly compelling.
The book concludes with a meta-text listing everything wrong with it: an editorial rejection letter which asks if Tulathimutte is actually projecting his own insecurities on to his characters. Fiction, as the previous stories have shown, is infinitely more interesting than this sort of pop psychology. But the letter is also an indirect meditation on the act of writing, and the terror of vulnerability. Every one of Rejection’s protagonists, the letter writer observes, becomes “a writer of some sort, committing acts of grotesque self-exposure – and self-destruction – by text”. Some of these texts go viral, interpreted in ways outside their authors’ control, making self-exposure and self-destruction feel like the same thing. And yet as the characters double down on their screen-based isolation, they compulsively write and write, both courting and fearing the possibility of being seen and even understood. “It hurts to be read,” the letter concludes. It also hurts not to try.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is published by 4th Estate (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
