The Brooklyn Rail

One of the delightful yet maddening things about Rejection, Tony Tulathimutte’s new novel-in-stories, is how it is already anticipating readers’ reactions and objections. As its title implies, the book coalesces around its characters’ various shortcomings—real and imagined—and provides a glimpse into the multitude of reasons why someone might be rejected romantically, socially, or professionally. In lesser hands, the conceit might have been cold and stodgy, but Tulathimutte’s deft approach to writing these interconnected narratives is nothing short of brilliant.

We talked over Zoom about his approach to writing Rejection, what he is or isn’t saying about the internet, and whether literary success has improved his social life. Throughout, the same blend of witty humor and intelligence found on his X posts were on full display.

James Yu (Rail): What was your approach to writing the individual stories that make up Rejection?

Tony Tulathimutte: I didn’t have an outline or anything more than just a vague idea. It’s usually only after working on it for several years that I start to get a grip on what the stories are really about. “The Feminist” wasn’t even about a male feminist, for the first four years when I worked on it. It was just about a guy who got rejected a lot and was sort of oblivious. Around 2017 or 2018, I got the idea that he’d specifically pride himself on his feminist bona fides.

Rail: Did you know “The Feminist” would be part of a larger work or did that come later?

Tulathimutte: From the beginning, I knew it was going to be a book, and called it a novel because I didn’t have anything else to call it. It was supposed to be half fiction and half nonfiction, and I’d even imagined it in a tête-bêche format, like old Ace Double novels. The fiction parts were mostly what became the book, and the nonfiction part was a really long meandering essay.

Rail: Wasn’t that “The Rejection Plot,” which you published online in the the Paris Review Daily?

Tulathimutte: That was part of it. It was carved out of a larger thing that was around 20,000 words and included a bunch of weird things like fake logical proofs, a glossary, and knock-knock jokes. I was trying to write about rejection in every way I could possibly think of doing it. And one of these actually survived and I reworked it into a fictional format which is “Sixteen Metaphors.” The story that no interviewer asks me about.

Rail: I was worried you would bring that up. It felt like a poem to me.

Tulathimutte: I mean, it is unusual. But it wouldn’t be unfamiliar to someone who has read Lydia Davis, and if she gets to call them stories, so do I!

Anyway, I worked on all the stories individually, but I knew they were going to be connected. So whenever I introduced characters, I thought about their potential to be protagonists in other stories. Organizing them came down to thinking about what form they would take. The first three stories are actually pretty similar in that they’re written in third person, sort of a distant limited omniscient narration. It’s a mobile point of view that goes close, with moments of ironic distance where the narrator takes potshots about things the characters can’t see themselves.

I got that idea from the self-help genre. Of course, rejection is pretty common as a sort of a subplot or a character motivation in stories from Othello to Greco-Roman myths, Young Werther, etc. But I also read a lot of scientific studies and I noticed in a lot of these self-help books that they like to use this device where they’ll create a fictional character, and play out this Goofus-and-Gallant narrative—where they’ll show him waking up at 6:30 in the morning, making his coffee—and you as a reader are supposed to soberly assess what they’re doing right and where they’re going wrong. And I thought that was kind of a fun format, and I also liked how briskly it moved along.

Developing the connections between the characters was the other way I wanted the book to progress. The first story feels like a standalone piece. And then you get to the second story, and there’s a point at which you’re like oh, this is connected to the first one. Then you get to the third story, and at first it doesn’t seem linked, but you find out later that it is in a roundabout way, through two degrees of separation.

But this is where the form starts to shift into an epistolary narrative, and the theme isn’t so much rejection as its absence or toxic opposite. And from there it keeps stripping away conventions, passing through metafiction into what is arguably nonfiction. So with every step you’re going into new territory. It creates a kind of bumpy but coherent arc and in my head, I was thinking of it as formalizing the sort of dialectical psychology of rejection—the way in which your idea of yourself or of a situation will mutate as it goes through hypotheticals. And that’s what I wanted the book to do formally, too.

Rail: Would you say you’re a formalist?

Tulathimutte: For me, it’s mostly that the story cannot work unless I find the right form for it. And the later I got into the book, the more I found myself having to do full rewrites of the stories, because the forms just weren’t working. So “Our Dope Future,” for example, started off as a Tinder conversation, and the first six pages were just one guy DMing the other person, “Hey, Hey, Hey,” over and over again for three years, and then he launches into a very pompous monologue. And I was only keeping that form because I really wanted to start with that gag, but it just wasn’t working any more. A Reddit post ended up being more suited to this sort of grandstanding.

Rail: When the viral opening story in your novel, “The Feminist”, was originally published in 2019 by n+1, you tweeted, “feminism is good, this character is not good.” Why did you feel the need to post that?

Tulathimutte: That was a doomed and futile attempt to head off what I anticipated as, like, the dumbest misconstrual of the story. Andrea Long Chu immediately teased me for it, which I totally deserved. I was being too tight-gripped and defensive, knowing how content travels online: people are not necessarily consuming it as a short story available to interpretation, but as rhetoric advancing a point of view. I was not trying to write a moral fiction with that story. Morality in fiction works best when it emerges from your own authentic responses to the characters and situations. It should come out of the reader as much as the writer, which is why it was a mistake to try to stick my nose into it with an authorial point-of-view wrapper when I should have just let it be everyone else’s problem.

Fortunately, people don’t listen that much to authors, anyway. The way people responded to that story really ran the gamut—there was no consensus about whether you’re supposed to sympathize with the character, and at what point he forfeits the reader’s sympathy. But I’ve learned my lesson, and will only obfuscate from now on.

Rail: Your novel made me wonder about the validity of your characters’ feelings of rejection.

Tulathimutte: When you get rejected, it’s meaningful to you. Even though it’s insubstantial and nothing changes, it’s not at all trivial. The thing that you tend to perseverate on is the way that you look to your rejector. You devise theories about why they rejected you, and sometimes you try to wheedle clarification out of them, which is never soigné. It was important to me to show that in some cases, the things that you’re dreading other people are seeing in you—and are rejecting you for—are real. Craig (the feminist) is somebody who is oblivious to how he comes off to other people. On the other hand, you have Kant, who is way too hard on himself, thinks no one could ever find him attractive, and this becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So having this stereoscopic perspective was important for conveying that, and is one of the things that hopefully makes the book hang together.

Rejections do happen for every kind of reason, and most center around these indeterminate questions of character and circumstance. Was the light unflattering on that particular day? Was the other person in a bad mood? Is it just a misunderstanding, or poor timing? Are the reasons they gave you for rejecting you honest, or are they sparing your feelings? Do they themselves even really know why? Can they, or will they, change their minds? Can you, or should you, change yourself to make that happen? The book asks these questions, but they don’t have answers.

Rail: How much does the internet and social media play into how these characters understand themselves? How does it distort their personalities and foment their problems?

Tulathimutte: I’ve been asked this question a lot now. The question is usually something like, “What am I trying to say about the internet?” And the answer is nothing. The internet is just furniture. I completely cop to being three standard deviations above the mean in terms of how online I am. But I do think people my age or younger spend half or more of their time socializing on the internet, especially since 2020.

But I will say that being online is obviously relevant to being lonely and isolated, like these characters are. The ersatz sociality of the internet both palliates loneliness and intensifies it. Every now and again you’re reminded that the people that you’re interacting with are, in a sense, not real. That is, you are interacting not with a person, but with a virtual construct operated by a real person, and the exposure you get to that person is even more constrained and finessed than it is in real life. And the person you are to them is not real either, in the sense of, “I’m a person in front of you right now with a Social Security number and a nervous system; you can’t mute me or leave me on read; and you could, if you wanted, reach over and slap my face or lick me or whatever.”

So, it creates opportunities for these characters to inhabit a social sphere that is mostly invented in their heads. In the absence of things you know, in the absence of presence, your mind fills in the vacuum with your own paranoid doubts and fantasies. In a funny way, the most social character in the book is Craig, the feminist. He’s the one who actually hangs out with people. Everybody else is stuck inside, imagining these communities that they believe themselves to belong to, but are actually profound loners.

Rail: Alison, in “Pics” is part of a group chat with people she’d interned with long ago but doesn’t meet that often. It feels like a pale imitation of a real friend group.

Tulathimutte: The narrator in “Main Character”, Bee, says how in real community, bonds are not easily dissolved and antagonisms have to be sustained. In Alison’s case, all it takes to be excommunicated from her group is to have a meltdown, and for everyone else to press a button to leave a group chat. She’s never going to see them again, but the irony is she barely ever saw them to begin with. If they were next door neighbors, or if they were co-workers and she had to see them every day, there might have been potential for reconciliation over time.

It’s not all bad that online relationships are light and ephemeral. You can manage hundreds of them easily, and you can meet people you would never meet otherwise. I’ve made real life friendships with people this way many times.

But anyone who has used a dating app knows that the lack of shared ties and social context is going to affect the quality of the interaction, or the commitment to any one particular interaction. Unless they happen to be unusually compassionate, they’re not going to have as much invested, and are going to be more mercenary and quit the second that it ceases to gratify them.

Rail: Now that you’re well established in your writing career, do you feel less rejected?

Tulathimutte: I mean, I’m in a better place with my work. I know that most of what I write now will get published, and if it doesn’t, I don’t care that much—I can just try again with something else. Usually if something doesn’t get published, that’s because I’ve decided I don’t want it to go out.

Rail: How about beyond Tony the writer to Tony the person?

Tulathimutte: Yeah, that hasn’t changed. I’m sorry. I fucking hope it does! People have an inflated sense of what publishing a book does for you socially. I don’t get invited to parties. And I’m not good at setting my own itinerary.

Rail: Maybe you get invited to some parties.

Tulathimutte: Okay, yeah. I get invited to the issue launches of literary quarterlies.