Post read reflections: Rejection

by Tony Tulathimutte

A little while ago I watched a video of Jia Tolentino speaking about this book called Rejection saying it was “depraved. It is truely shocking”. So naturally I thought.. that sounds like my exact kind of book. And it really did not disappoint!
Rejection, by Tony Tulathimutte, doesn’t just reject… it writhes, howls, self-immolates, then rebuilds itself into something even more unhinged. It’s a collection of short stories, where each character is somehow connected to the last, however it feels more like one long continous tale. I read it in a kind of fever, flipping pages so fast I could feel my own pulse in the paper, my brain stretched to breaking by the relentless, fractal unraveling of it all.

I’m still reeling from the last chapter! I think my mind bent at a right angle and hasn’t quite snapped back. It was like standing in a hall of mirrors and realizing the reflections are all slightly off, wrong in ways that make your stomach drop. Was it real, was it ever real, what was I reading? Was I being read? The form eating itself, collapsing, resurrecting, like a snake devouring its own tail and then laughing about it. The voice fracturing, multiplying, evaporating.

For a little something extra, I also loved reading Jia’s review of Rejection published here in the New Yorker. In it she says:

“Not 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. It sucks for them, the inept, lonely, self-obsessed, self-righteous, self-imprisoned protagonists of these linked stories, but it’s a thrill for the sickos among us, the king being Tulathimutte, who gives loserdom its own rancid carnival.”

I’ve never read a book where I squirmed so much from sheer cringy behaviour and second hand embarrassment, and I gotta say… this sicko loved every single second of it!