Tony Tulathimutte’s Journey Through Very Online Humiliation

In Tony Tulathimutte’s debut novel, Private Citizens, Will, a computer programmer, wonders “whether masturbating to porn was an art form: not as ‘erotica’ or performance art, but as solitary pursuit of the sublime.” Surely, he thinks, “someone must have done it seriously, subtly, with literacy and flair, a masturbauteur.” Tulathimutte’s fiction teems with such figures, but if their self-pleasure is an art, it’s usually a baroque one—tragic, violent, or both. Will himself is eventually reduced to “watching porn on the toilet dual-wielding his phone and dick” after he and his girlfriend, Vanya, consent to livestream themselves 16 hours a day to promote Vanya’s startup, Sable (they get four 15-minute breaks for bathroom time).

Will’s abasement pales in comparison to the sad sacks populating Tulathimutte’s new collection of linked stories, Rejection. In “The Feminist,” originally published in n+1, the titular character adopts a “‘dry’ method” of jerking off to eliminate any telltale sounds his roommates might overhear; by the end of the story, he has to use “a textured plumber’s glove in order to feel anything at all.” Alison, the protagonist of “Pics,” can only fall asleep by “dully prodding herself with her vibrator” while streaming old episodes of The Office. And in “Ahegao,” video game designer Kant is a thwarted sadist—“Who has the desire and patience to be railed, much less subjugated, by a jittery, inexpressive virgin?”—who brings himself to climax with fantasies so extreme and specific that the request he sends to an adult content creator for a personalized video spans 14 pages and requires both green screen and practical effects.

For Tulathimutte’s characters, touching themselves is the human touch of last resort. As Rejection’s title suggests, they are all exiles from what you might call the sexual contract, unable to form lasting romantic connections as a result of personality defects, bizarre proclivities, unrequited attachments, and/or factors outside of their control: Kant, who is Thai American, notes that “every fiftieth profile or so” he comes across on a Grindr-like app contains the phrase “no fats femmes asians, each applying to him in varying degrees.” The humiliations of dating app culture are just one of many ways that digitally mediated life exacerbates their loneliness: Some blame the internet for inculcating their socially unacceptable kinks; others feel alienated by the kind of zero-sum identity politics that flourish on social media. Pretty much every character falls victim at one point or another to the graphomania that constant connectivity encourages, writing texts, posts, or emails that will come back to haunt them.

Private Citizens, which followed four Stanford alumni making their hapless way through mid-aughts San Francisco, also explored themes of tech-enabled depravity, liberal hypocrisy, and sexual failure—Will even maintains a list of the women who have snubbed him, alongside criteria like “approximate date of rejection, and her height, age, race, ethnicity, and estimates of income, weight, IQ.” But Tulathimutte’s debut novel was more kaleidoscopic, a send-up of millennial pathologies that also took aim at reality TV, New Age management seminars, plastic surgery, hipster self-hatred, and venture capitalism, among many other targets. In Rejection, he narrows his scope, offering a series of variations on foiled desire, like movements in a perverted symphony. Until, that is, a belated turn reveals the book is concerned not only with Very Online sexual frustration, but with the plight of the author in the internet age.

“The Feminist,” Rejection’s opener, establishes a template that many of its subsequent stories will follow. Narrated in a circumlocutory close third person—Tulathimutte rarely uses one word where three will do—it follows an alternately pitiable and repellant subject on his path from hopeful attempts at love to aggrieved acceptance of solitude. The eponymous feminist is a cis, straight, white man whose progressive education has taught him to disavow the source of his own invisible oppression (narrow shoulders). His online dating profile signals his disdain for the “imperialist male supremacist hetero patriarchy,” and his friends are mostly women, in part because “the women he tries to date offer him friendship instead.” While he respects their autonomy, he imagines their attraction to assholes is a form of false consciousness. Like many of Rejection’s characters, his self-obsession rarely converts into self-awareness.

The feminist often seeks validation from his “QPOC agender friend,” until said friend loses patience with his self-pity and humiliates him at a picnic: “Wild how you’re always right and nobody’s ever had it worse, nobody’s as pure and as wronged as you. Yo everyone! Check out the Woman Respecter!” So wounded is he by this encounter that he withdraws from his friend group entirely—not that they’d notice—and gives up on getting any sex he doesn’t have to pay for. Eventually, he chokes down the red pill, finding solace on rationalist men’s rights forums like “NSOM” (Narrow Shoulders/Open Minds). You could uncharitably read “The Feminist” as a parable about the dangers of misandry, but Tulathimutte makes it clear that his protagonist has only traded one form of groupthink for another. One young NSOM poster articulates the narrowness of this form of belonging: “I can’t lie and say it isn’t nice to find other NS guys, but this place is like staring into a cursed mirror where the longer you stare at it the uglier you get.” That ugliness reaches its apotheosis in the story’s shocking final moments, as it dawns on you that the feminist has become that most American of monsters: a mass shooter.

This rapid tone shift, from extravagant satire to fleeting gravitas, is repeated across Rejection, often at roughly the same point—when characters have finally abandoned the dream of mutual affection. (Only “Our Dope Future,” written as a lengthy “Am I the Asshole?” Reddit post by a natalist startup founder with a tenuous grasp on internet slang, remains a punch line from pretty much start to finish.) “Pics” is, for most of its 60 pages, a cringe comedy about a woman whose inability to get over an abortive dalliance with a longtime friend leads her to various forms of self-sabotage and lashing out, including casual anti-Asian racism, acquiring a raven that tries to bite her finger off from an online seller, and instigating a friendship-ending fight in her group chat. But the laughter dries up when the long-term consequences of her unraveling become clear: “After many years she will see the whole saga not as a tragedy but as the beginning of a horrific process of self-understanding, at the end of which she will accept that whether or not it has been her choice, to be and feel nothing will be all that has made life possible.” Rejection’s flirtations with profundity are not always this successful: When Kant accidentally sends his graphic custom porn video script to an email list of friends, family, and co-workers at the end of “Ahegao,” it’s too slapstick to generate much pathos.

“Main Character,” a novella-length story that occupies most of Rejection’s final third, takes the form of a master post on a forum dedicated to an “internet hoax/scandal” known as “Botgate,” consisting of some prefatory remarks, the scandal’s source text (or at least the most canonical version of it), and multiple appendices of commentary. The Botgate text is a mysterious post by someone named Bee, who is in a sense the book’s missing piece: They are Kant’s sibling and the feminist’s “QPOC friend,” a character who clarifies the point at which the stories all intersect. For the first time, Bee’s story flips the perspective from rejected to rejector, though its subject is not romantic love nor sexual conquest. What they’ve rejected instead is the entire concept of identity, beyond its cynical weaponization: “I just wanted to exist without ordering the prix fixe, be more than an infinitesimal coordinate in a million-dimensional matrix of demographics.” As their post explains, the urge to be unclassifiable started young—Bee sold their gender to a classmate for $22 in the third grade, inspired by the episode of The Simpsons where Bart does the same with his soul. In college, their rejection of “categorization tout court” mostly took the form of interminable debates at their college co-op. It wasn’t until they moved back home years later to take care of their cancer-stricken mother that Bee began to undertake what they call “identity terrorism.”

This scheme is the essence of Botgate, an attempt to explode identity through a two-prong plan to “undermine confidence that anyone you interacted with online was real” and “so thoroughly debauch discourse by filling the place with freak behavior and godawful takes that nobody would ever again take its tenets seriously.” For five years, Bee partially automated thousands of abandoned accounts across various social media platforms to foment scandals and cancellations, until the “exodus to video” put most of their bots out of commission. But “if you were online at all between 2014 and 2019, you’ve absolutely dealt with one of them.” The post ends by undercutting its own veracity, claiming to be just one of 230 versions produced by feeding the true story into a large language model: a final bid to avoid, as a popular meme goes, the mortifying ideal of being known. That hasn’t stopped members of the Botgate forum from speculating. One popular theory, advanced by a user named GlassJawn, is that Bee’s post and the many accounts contained within it “are in toto the work of thai american novelist TONY TULATHIMUTTE.”

This postmodern twist recasts “Main Character” as an unflattering analogy for literary production—the author as mouth-breathing puppet master, playing shell games with a captive audience for revenge or their own amusement. Its consequences ripple through the entire collection. If Botgate is nothing but a series of shitposts by Tulathimutte, then that means Bee never existed at all—and neither did Kant, or the feminist, or any of Rejection’s other recurring characters. He made them all up. Of course, we know this to be literally true. But, as most novels do, the book has until now depended on our suppression of that knowledge. Insisting we recognize this basic fact suggests that much of Rejection is misdirection: These stories are not really about the loneliness of the incel, but of the fiction writer.

“Main Character” would be a perfectly sensible place for Rejection to end. But having twitched the curtain, Tulathimutte is compelled to take center stage. In “Re: Rejection,” written in the form of a letter addressed to “Tony,” an undifferentiated group of publishers informs the author that they will be passing on his manuscript submission, also titled Rejection. Though it’s obvious to begin with, “Re: Rejection” concludes with the confession that its collective voice is actually Tulathimutte’s own, and he lays bare what he’s up to here: “a ventriloquist act where you voice misgivings about the book through a fictional jury of scowling publishers.”

It’s not uncommon for contemporary fiction to come predigested these days, wreathed in enough protective irony to render any shortcomings plausibly intentional, or else pointing up those very shortcomings in knowing dialogue. Tulathimutte’s act of autocriticism takes things a step further, however, offering a detailed exegesis of each story in the collection and dismissing the possibility that someone else might produce a worthy reading of them: “It hurts to be read. When people don’t like it, that’s terrible and nothing can be done. And even when they do, they usually do so for the wrong reasons, project what isn’t there, draw the wrong conclusions, form the wrong idea about why it was written.”

“Re: Rejection” seems designed to irritate anyone who resents being told what to think. It anticipates the worst kind of reader, one intent on reducing the book to its sublimated biographical content. Worst of all, it’s a trap. You can disagree with his analysis, but he’s already set the terms of the debate. And Tulathimutte knows he’s won. “If each protagonist in this book is a casualty of rejection, then on a conceptual level, it is at least somewhat interesting that you have tried to make yourself the final character, and your readers the rejectors,” he writes. You can’t fire him; he quits!

This exasperating coda is an ingenious example of a technique the writer Lauren Oyler once called “literary trolling,” which includes maneuvers such as “playing multidimensional chess: when you do something stupid enough to engage your opponent in a set of strategic maneuvers designed to frustrate and confuse them.” Well, checkmate. If the act of crafting an online persona is essentially a form of authorship, as “Main Character” contends, then why shouldn’t the novelist borrow from the arsenal of the troll? So many of the precipitating causes of internet scandals—queerbaiting, race-faking, dissembling about the fact that you grew up obscenely rich or secretly work for a weapons manufacturer—are at bottom fictions. By imitating the methods of this outrage-bait, Tulathimutte captures the disorienting experience of being manipulated by a stranger on social media. And he gets the added pleasure of subjecting his readers to the kinds of indignities he sees as intrinsic to the publishing process, where bad faith abounds.

The imaginary publishers of “Re: Rejection” note that “special pleading on your own behalf, by way of adversarial autofiction” is a device Tulathimutte used in his first novel, too, and indeed passages of this story strongly resemble the feedback that a character in Private Citizens receives in a college creative writing workshop that obviously doubled as a description of his own style: “I guess the concern there would be that the story becomes, like, a prank? Saying nyah-nyah, see, I’m smarter than you. No one’s saying it’s bad, it’s just ... a chilly, sort of valueless sensibility.” I’d be tempted to agree if having a laugh weren’t something I personally happen to value, though ideally not at my own expense.

Reading Rejection, I couldn’t help but think of another floridly obscene writer, fond of metafictional high jinks, whose characters are given to great torrents of speechifying and creative acts of onanism: Philip Roth. Roth’s 1986 novel, The Counterlife, also features multiple distinct moments of fourth wall breaking that radically recast our understanding of it. First, protagonist Nathan Zuckerman—one of Roth’s recurring avatars—dies, leaving behind a manuscript that happens to be the very book we’re reading (and carrying on a conversation with his widow, Maria, from beyond the grave-slash-page). Later, Maria announces that she is leaving the novel, and she and Nathan perform an epistolary autopsy of their relationship that doubles as a commentary on Roth’s resentments and writerly fixations: “You are forty-five years old and something of a success—it’s high time you imagined life working out. Why this preoccupation with irresolvable conflict? Don’t you want a new mental life?”

Like “Main Character,” The Counterlife acknowledges, on the one hand, that the self is always a construction, and also that the selves in this particular text all happen to be constructed by a single external consciousness. “What I have ... is a variety of impersonations I can do,” Zuckerman writes, “and not only of myself—a troupe of players that I have internalized, a permanent company of actors that I can call upon when a self is required.” Unlike Tulathimutte, though, Roth is willing to relinquish control of his players, who are part of but not reducible to him. “It may be as you say that this is no life,” Zuckerman tells Maria, “but use your enchanting, enrapturing brains: this life is as close to life as you, and I, and our child can ever hope to come.” The Counterlife’s formal tricks multiply its potential meanings rather than foreclosing them. If Rejection is a hall of mirrors, all it reflects is its author.