In 2016, I was lolling around Miami on the eve of Florida’s Republican presidential primary. I had time to kill in the March sun, and with me was a new book called Private Citizens. The debut novel of Tony Tulathimutte, a graduate of the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Private Citizens had received a glowing review in New York Magazine, where it was declared something of the first great millenial novel. Wary, if intrigued, I bought the book and began to read; I was not let down. Tulathimutte is a wicked satirist and a deft craftsman of character and interiority. As affectless, forgettable prose came into vogue in the 2010s, autofictions spreading like a plague, Tulathimutte’s send-up of the tech-addled, Bay Area milieu was a refreshing departure. Eight years later, Tulathimutte is back with Rejection, his second book. Classified simply as fiction—it is not described as either a novel or a short story collection, though it reads like an interconnecting set of short stories with a meta-fictive flourish—Rejection is already garnering early buzz, and does not, at its hilarious and scatological peaks, disappoint. The early chapters, in my view, are the very best, particularly his studies of an incel, a spurned young woman, and an outwardly meek man with savagely subversive sexual proclivities. If there is a single theme across the chapters, it’s baked into the title: rejection, and the darkness that encroaches on those who are turned away—or turn themselves away.
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