Rejection (2024)

Rejection is a 2024 short story collection by Thai American writer Tony Tulathimutte, published by William Morrow and Company. Considered a novel-in-stories, the book includes pieces which Tulathimutte had published in magazines like n+1 and The Paris Review, including the controversial story "The Feminist". It was longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction.

Content

Tulathimutte, while at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2011, came up with the idea for a book titled Rejection while lying face-down in bed. Just a year before, in 2010, Tulathimutte had started writing stories that intertwined identity politics with comedy.

Considered a novel-in-stories, the book comprises seven stories. The first three stories, "The Feminist", "Pics", and "Ahegao" compose a "trilogy" of "different types of rejection". In the second half of the book, Tulathimutte explores more metafictional and experimental forms with "Main Character", "Our Dope Future"—which takes the form of a Reddit post—"Sixteen Metaphors", and "Re:Rejection", a story in the form of a letter which rejects the book being read. Tulathimutte cited "The Depressed Person" by David Foster Wallace and The Easter Parade by Richard Yates as inspirations for the short story collection.

"The Feminist", a story about a male feminist who becomes misogynistic after a series of rejections, was originally written from 2011 to 2013, with Tulathimutte knowing that it would be part of a "half fiction and half nonfiction" book in the future. The nonfiction half would eventually split off and become "The Rejection Plot" published in The Paris Review in 2024. In 2019, "The Feminist" would be published by n+1 to much controversy; in anticipation, Tulathimutte tweeted "feminism is good, this character is not good." In winter of 2023, "Ahegao" was published in The Paris Review.

Plot

The first short story, titled "The Feminist", centres upon an as-yet unnamed male character who insists he is a feminist but is frequently irked about, and resentful of, women's dismissal of him as a potential romantic partner. He blames women's decades-long rejection of him on superficial issues, such as his 'narrow shoulders', and women's apparent callousness and selfishness, calling women who reject him shallow hypocrites. His loneliness and anger manifests itself physically - he develops something adjacent to erectile dysfunction as well as cognitive issues. Things take a dark turn when his friend, whom he only refers to as his "QPOC agender friend", calls him out for his endless self-pitying, insisting that his interest in feminism is entirely self-serving and a thinly veiled attempt to emotionally manipulate women into having sex with him. Outraged by this confrontation, the narrator regresses more and more into the online world of misogyny and inceldom, attacking women and men who support women online. The story ends with the narrator entering a restaurant he frequently visits with a black ski mask on, implying that he intends to bring his violent thoughts about women to real life.

The second short story, titled "Pics", centers upon Alison, a lonely woman in her late twenties who works in magazine journalism and used to struggle with an eating disorder. Alison is also part of a group chat with her much younger, and much more confident, ex-work colleagues. One night she has a sexual encounter with her close friend Neil, where she consents to having a nude picture of herself taken; afterwards he tells her it was a one-off event and doesn't want to spoil their friendship. Although Alison initially agrees to these terms, she soon becomes filled with rage and resentment over being rejected by someone she believed deeply cared about her. She vents her frustrations to her group chat, who offer good advice, but doesn't listen to any of it. Instead she gets drunk whilst hanging out with Neil and his conventionally attractive and thin Asian "friend" Cece. Alison humiliates Neil and then herself by making casually racist remarks to Cece; when she later discusses the incident with her groupchat over text (she deliberately omits the parts where she made herself look bad) they also agree that her remarks about Cece were racist and uncalled for. Alison quickly backtracks over her comments but is still deeply resentful of Cece and her relationship with Neil, obsessively stalking the two of them online. Over time Alison still cannot get over the incident and retreats further into isolation, self-hatred and self-pity. She adopts a raven named "Pootie" and invites her group-chat friends over for dinner. Unexpectedly, one of them, who is heavily pregnant, brings her five-year-old son with her. The hangout is a disaster - Alison cooks a terrible meal, is forced to lock away her bird so it doesn't attack her friend's child and ends up in A&E with a severe finger injury. Later she discovers an oil stain on her couch left by her heavily pregnant friend. This triggers Alison into launching into an angry tirade in the group chat, where she insults everyone in it and they, in turn, insult her. The story ends with Alison attending the wedding of Neil and the visibly pregnant Cece, where Neil reveals he deleted the intimate photo of the two of them the day after they slept together. Alison infers that this confirms what she feared all along: that he genuinely never liked her in that way at all, ever. She finally realizes the all-consuming yearning, resentment, and anger she had felt are gone, leaving her numb.