Could be the year’s feel-bad book, but Tulathimutte’s inventiveness, his intellect, his sense of humor, and his precise style make his characters’ mortifications a pleasure to read ... Caustic, clever, funny, and humane.
Startlingly good ... Tulathimutte is devastatingly fluent in all modes of current slang, social-justice buzzwords and the recondite phraseology of the terminally online. There’s a volatile thrill to the writing that owes to the electricity of the language but also to the collision of extreme registers. The psychic torment of these characters can be as disturbing as graphic horror stories; it can also be snortingly funny.
Sounds unbearable, a human centipede of misery crossed with a brain worm becoming an Ouroboros. And yet it works. And it’s funny ... This frantic anticipation of critique would be so annoying if it wasn’t also so smart. Turns out blue balls can kill a guy. They can also make a really good story.
This book is so cold and lonely you could hang meat in it ... I read Rejection during a week when I felt down, and it almost stubbed me out, like a cigarette ... But Tulathimutte is such an acutely observant writer that I was entranced by his book despite its narrowness and emotional barbarity ... He’s tanked up, bleakly funny and always stropping his knife ... Tulathimutte’s writing about these matters is sophisticated, circumspect, impossible to pin down. He’s an elusive anatomist of culture-war provocations ... This book is not for everyone. I’m not sure it’s for me. But I’ve scraped myself up off the floor to be able to write: Tulathimutte is a big talent and he is clearly just getting started.
Mot until I picked up Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection did I realize how fun it could be to read a book about a bunch of huge fucking losers ... Incredibly depraved ... One of the delights of Tulathimutte’s book is his revival of some unfashionable formal pleasures—the theatrically ironic, O. Henry-style twist ending.
Rapid tone shift, from extravagant satire to fleeting gravitas, is repeated across Rejection ... Flirtations with profundity are not always...successful ... 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.
Despite this mechanism’s well-worn grooves, Tulathimutte’s narrative spirals and circles get it to emit a perversely titillating song ... If such displays of self-defense are familiar enough to be clichés, predictable scripts are suddenly made uncanny again in this collection.
Tulathimutte’s deployment of absurdity and hyperbole has mixed results ... Raises the question of whether Tulathimutte’s deeper subjects, beyond the plight of the rejected and the warping dynamics of online pseudo-life, aren’t the limits of realism and fiction itself ... The dialectical opposite of the novels of the current most popular anglophone novelist of manners: virtuosic and maximalist on the prose level instead of plain and spare, ironic and cynical in its treatment of politics rather than earnestly gestural, unyielding to fantasies of romantic fulfillment and happy endings.
Pleasingly abject ... Tulathimutte’s stories are impressive, but that doesn’t make them nice to read. Their unpleasantness is testament to the perversity of their subject matter, because the writing itself is enormous fun. Tulathimutte seizes on the indignities of contemporary language and wrests them into absurdities ... Descriptions are satisfyingly tart ... The ...least successful story in Rejection [is] a fake rejection letter from [Tulathimutte's] publisher ... These stories are everything that a good post should be—including a little too outrageous to be believable ...
But Tulathimutte’s command of the outlandishness of life online doesn’t always translate to his depictions of the real world ... Most of Tulathimutte’s characters are nothing but their online avatars: pure shtick, without any interior life ... Yet for all its ruthlessness, there is something optimistic about Rejection.
Against the odds, Tulathimutte renders these losers sympathetic—or at least believably human ... The collection’s sharpest stories slice sexual rejection in multiple ways ... The breezy, studied aloofness of the book’s language belies its emotional and intellectual reserves ... Rejection is perversely funny and piercingly perceptive, but wearying, too. It mercilessly skewers the logic of the internet without ever entirely breaking free from it; there’s no transcendence here, just so much misery.
Piercing ... Tulathimutte’s maximalist prose and unflinching depictions of his characters’ self-sabotage engender a mixture of empathy, discomfort and disdain in the reader ... In all its extremity and vulgarity, the world of Rejection is horribly familiar. In the words of the author, reading it is 'like staring into a cursed mirror where the longer you stare at it the uglier you get, but it’s so fascinating you keep staring'.
What makes the stories so readable...is Tulathimutte’s magnetic prose, at once entertaining and acute ... The stories capture the spirit of our doomscrolling age ... Compelling.
[A] blazingly perceptive new short-story collection surveying loneliness’s rock bottom ... Tulathimutte is an acute chronicler of contemporary loneliness. It’s scary how precisely he re-creates a certain type of group chat, bound by gossip and witty displays of onlineness, which are only tenable if you don’t mistake the intensity of communication for proof of genuine commitment.
Vivid ... The structure of Rejection is distinctive as well, riddled with group text messages, acronyms and the jargon of those raised with the internet.
Shrewd ... The prose is consistently sharp and funny as Tulathimutte cuts to the truth of his characters’ dilemmas. It’s a first-rate exploration of yearning and solitude.
The characters, ideas, and symbols echo across the stories, and these metatextual layers—along with the layers of internet lore and memes—create a hilariously brazen and existentially unsettling portrait of modern life, love, and identity. An inventive and shameless story collection for the chronically online.
