Rejection
By Tony Tulathimutte
William Morrow, 272 pages, $28
For a while, the story about contemporary publishing has been that men are out. Especially unwelcome are stories about male desire and frustration. The last person anyone in literary publishing wants to hear from, or about, is a creepy, entitled incel. The publication and reception of Tony Tulathimutte’s interconnected short-story collection Rejection should make us rethink these assumptions about the state of American literature. Tulathimutte’s sophomore work, which Vulture has called the “first great incel novel,” has been widely praised and highly remunerative (the author received a $350,000 advance).
Rejection tells a series of stories about people who face an intractable lack of cooperation from others in the fulfilment of their desires. We are used to hearing such people, especially if they are male, spoken of only as a problem for society and never as victims worthy of sympathy. That’s what made the first story in Tulathimutte’s collection, “The Feminist,” so shocking when it appeared in n+1 in 2019. The story is told from the perspective of an archetypal “nice guy,” a self-proclaimed feminist man with many progressive female friends who finds himself unable over many years to turn any of these friendships into a romance. Finally, while still declaring his feminism “impeccable,” he decides that women are guilty of oppressing him through their de facto preference for patriarchal ideals of masculinity. This leads him, perhaps, to commit a terrible act of violence at the story’s end. Those who received the story positively when it was released saw it as a vicious satire of a particularly odious and dangerous kind of man, an interpretation Tulathimutte seemed to encourage in a tweet that read: “To be clear in advance: Feminism is good, this character is not good.”
“No character arises to offer a compelling rebuttal to his gradually darkening worldview.”
But there’s a reason he found the tweet necessary. The story depicts the agonizing contradictions of its main character’s existence in a way that can’t simply be dismissed with a scoff. The unnamed “feminist” faces a problem for which mainstream feminism seems to offer no remedy. No character arises to offer a compelling rebuttal to his gradually darkening worldview. His friends are depicted as basically unimaginative and self-centered, unwilling to concern themselves with his plight.