Rejection and the bad side of the internet
Does everything suck now? Is that just what we're in for? I really hope not.
I should start by saying I don’t think I’m a good book reviewer. I don’t think I have especially unique insights about what I read. I don’t keep a GoodReads page going in which I write at length about what’s a 4-star book, versus one that merits only 3 1/2. I don’t even belong to a book club. My thoughts on most books tend toward “I liked this,” or “I didn’t like this,” or, more often than I care to admit, “I got bored with this and stopped.”1
So take what I have to say about Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte with a grain of salt. I liked it, I think. But I also didn’t. Mostly.. I’m a little hung up on it.
The book is a series of short stories about young-ish people in their 20s/30s who are out there in the world, trying to date, trying to find people to date, and who are, in some form or another, rejected. That’s the basic premise. The first of these short stories, The Feminist, was originally published in 2019 in n+1 magazine, and you can read it in full following the link, if you want. That story is about an unnamed protagonist who is The Right Kind of Sensitive White Male — the kind who Respects Women and Holds Space for marginalized groups in all the right ways — and yet none of this sensitive guy schtick ever gets him laid, and eventually he just pitches over into being something else that is bad and gross and pretty incel-adjacent (or maybe just straight-up incel? This is where I start to feel ick about the whole vibe, so I’m reluctant to apply categorical labels).
The story is satire. It’s satire in that the basic theme is intentionally over-played, and it’s kiiiinda funny, but it’s being funny about a subject that is really not funny, and so there’s already a kind of interesting tension there. The second story in the book flips things around and focuses on a young woman who has a one time hookup with one of her longtime male friends, and then proceeds to never, ever get over it and essentially lets her miserable pining for her formerly “best guy friend” ruin her life. It’s also funny (like genuinely funny! I laughed!), but .. also kinda unsettling and gross.
From here, I kinda lose touch with this book, because the stories after that get waaayyy online and very modern. There’s a femme Asian gay who’s extremely hung up on his own kink/dom/porn fantasies; a hyper-online Elon wannabe-type who speaks only in weird internet slang; a non-categorizable person who is so belligerent about NOT identifying as anything (like, refuses to identify as nongender/nonbinary/anything) — these characters are neurotic in the extreme, and they’re neurotic because they canNOT stop thinking about themselves, their own shortcomings, their own trauma, their own dissatisfaction about how the world should cater to THEM and their needs. These people have never experienced a genuine or vulnerable moment with anyone — much less someone they want to date — because they are so in their own heads about being perceived or being a certain type of way. There’s no sense that these rejects have ever found a moment’s peace where they can put their own hang-ups aside and just *be* with another person. These people are insufferable, and no wonder they’ve been rejected. They should try to be fucking normal and live in the world as it is, but then of course they wouldn’t be characters in a satyrical novel about unloved hyper-online screw-ups.
And I mean.. What do I know? I am not out there on the dating apps (I hear they’re more garbage now than they’ve ever been). I am not, myself, a hyper-online edgelord or internet chad who speaks in memes and reddit references. I generally do what I can in life to avoid those people, but I can accept that they’re out there and they go on dates and their lives are not an unreasonable thing to write about.
The question I keep coming back to in my own mind is .. how much of this fucking matters? Like.. I don’t spend hours on the internet looking at tiktok or X posts or reddit or 4chan threads, and I don’t want to. But do I need to? Is that just where culture *is* now? Put another way — Donald Trump just won reelection, and there’s a certain way you can look at that fact as validating a whole swathe of society that people like me have really tried to pretend doesn’t exist. Maybe Elon and and barstool incels are having a moment, and, well.. shit. It’s actually me, hi, I’m the problem.
Anyway. Point is .. Rejection is an interesting book that starts out being accessible and wry and kind of insightful, and then heads off into spaces that I just don’t want to even go, and I think it’s uncomfortable and so, so modern and edgy and I really hope this isn’t a sign of things to come in our culture. Reviews of the book have been generally positive, though I think this review in Vulture gets at something worth noting about Tulathimutte’s hang-ups when writing about the sexuality of Asian characters (and particularly Asian women).
It was an interesting book to be reading this week of all weeks, what with … Trump and whatnot. Optimistic? No, not really. But worth thinking about.
Some other random bits and bobs from the week:
I liked this Josh Barro post about Trump’s lunatic cabinet appointments. Some of them are bound to get through, sure. But I think there were some reassuring points here about Gaetz. Christ on a bike, that hearing (if it happens) is going to be nuts.
Is BlueSky a thing now, I guess? Have we all decided this is BlueSky’s moment? I’m still kinda skeptical — probably because, as stated above, I’m just so suspicious of big online zeitgeists in the first place. But more than that, from what I’ve seen it just doesn’t *feel* all that buzzy in the way Twitter used to.
My old, but new-to-me song that I’ve been listening to this week is Where Will I Be by Emmylou Harris. This was a song that Freddie linked in one of his posts several months ago and I had forgotten about it. It’s just such a great middle-aged (yes, middle-aged! We’re reclaiming that term!) song. She was 48 when she wrote it, and it’s a song about just looking ahead and seeing how *much* of life is still out there and.. I dunno man. Leaves me thinking thoughts about.. Where are we all gonna end up? If I’m more or less halfway through life now (if I’m lucky).. what are the changes and tectonic shifts in our lives that we know are coming but we can’t possibly predict, and how is it that we’re going to be there, decades from now still living life, but in a way that’s at once familiar and also unrecognizable from our current vantage point?
Recent examples for each category include:
I liked this — Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin (it’s good! It takes place in Paris, and I really like Paris!)
I didn’t like this — My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh (bad people! silly ending!)
I got bored and stopped — Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. Good lord I wanted to like this book, but it went NOWHERE. Waaayyy too many passages that went on for 40 or 50 pages and the characters just freaked out and had outrageous meltdowns. I stuck with it for 229 pages, which I think was a lot for a book that said nothing and where nothing happened.