Pornsick Nabokov

Mike Jeffrey considers Tony Tulathimutte’s “Rejection.”

By Mike JeffreyNovember 8, 2024

• Fiction

I FIRST ENCOUNTERED Tony Tulathimutte through his 2016 review of Don DeLillo’s Zero K for The New Republic. “If you’re a longtime DeLillo fan,” he wrote, “you could call Zero K a grand summation of his career themes and prose stylings. You could also call it recycling.”

I was one of those longtime DeLillo fans, and I took offense. Who the hell does this guy think he is, taking shots at Don like that? I did a little digging, looking for reasons to dismiss him. I learned that Tulathimutte attended the Iowa Writers’ Workshop (another product of the Literary-Industrial Complex), was active on Twitter (eye roll), and had recently published his first book (big deal), Private Citizens (2016), which Vulture lauded as “the first great millennial novel” (doubt it). I wasn’t buying it—the book or the praise—and stuck with my preconceived notions and my loyalty to Don.

That was a mistake. I can now accept that Zero K is one of DeLillo’s weaker novels (I still love the New York sections), and now that I’ve actually read his books, I recognize that Tulathimutte is not merely an iconoclast but also a generational talent. Rejection, published at the end of summer, is the funniest novel you’ll read this year, even though it’s not identified as a novel on the cover and a lot of people have been calling it a collection of “linked stories.” (The subtitle reads “fiction” where you’d expect to find “a novel” or “stories.”) But the sequencing and interconnectedness of the book’s seven sections and the recurrences of its characters are more deliberate and consequential than what you encounter in a collection of stories. I like to jump around in a story collection, but Rejection needs to be read in order: it evolves sequentially, even though it’s not plot-driven or linear in structure. Is it “a novel in stories” then? No! You could reasonably call the first five sections “short stories,” but not the final two, “Sixteen Metaphors” and “Re: Rejection,” which are much weirder and shorter and more meta than the rest, and probably make little sense if you read them out of order. And that’s why I’m going to refer to Rejection’s “sections” instead of “stories” from here on out.

The first, “The Feminist,” details a white guy whose feminist allyship mutates, after decades of sexual and romantic rejection, into incel rage. The Feminist (identified in another section as “Craig”) blames his narrow-shouldered frame for his sexual exclusion. It’s definitely not because his “carefully word[ed]” bio on the dating apps describes him as “unshakably serious about consent,” “abortion’s #1 fan,” and “haunting the bookstores and bakeshops of our fair burgh, when [he’s] not dismantling the imperialist male supremacist hetero patriarchy.”

“The Feminist” operates on dramatic irony and the thrilling versatility of Tulathimutte’s diction. He’s a master of the high/low register and bends idioms to his will. You can crack open the book at random and see what I mean, but here’s Craig, ill at ease in the world, tortured by runaway desire and entitlement:

When he does go out in public, he avoids looking at any woman’s face, convincing himself it’s respectfully uncreepy, but aware in the gloomy sub-basement of his mind that the real reason is because if she is beautiful, then the image of her face, and the question of how he might have introduced himself, and the beautiful life they might have had together, will torment him for days.

The reader quickly recognizes Craig for what he is: an entitled, cringey, try-hard creep, and it’s obvious that his aggressive performance of virtuous lefty politics and unchecked self-pity are the reasons for his sexual frustration—not, as he claims, his narrow shoulders. A “QPOC agender friend” (who rejects Craig’s labeling and takes center stage as “Bee” in a later section) sums it up nicely: “You refuse pity but crave it so much that you won’t admit how strongly you invite it.”

These are the binds that interest Tulathimutte: thwarted desires and incomplete self-awareness that produce abject loneliness and disturbed fixations. In “Pics,” Alison, a fairly basic white girl, is unmoored by a one-night stand with a guy friend that fails to evolve into a relationship. Rather than become violent, Alison self-sabotages, alienating herself from the gal pals in her group chat and humiliating herself at her friend-turned-lover-turned-obsession’s wedding to a “hot tiny Asian girl.” Years later, she will regard this interval 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 considers how demographics and privilege influence a person’s suite of possible responses. No one here is financially desperate—they all have pretty jobs in tech or marketing. The rejected white dude chooses retribution, becoming a mass shooter. The white girl turns kind of racist and makes a scene at a wedding but ultimately accepts her rejection and experiences as a kind of emotional death. “[M]aybe I am nothing,” she reflects, “and this is the best I can offer to others, my absence in their lives, though they will never notice it or thank me. Still, their lives will be better for it.”

In “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” Kant, a short, 31-year-old Thai American, is let down by the supportive no-big-deal response to the coming-out email he sends to his family, friends, and colleagues. After enduring horrific bullying in high school—for being Asian, not for being gay—Kant withdrew into porn and developed a taste for degradation, an inversion of the trauma. Now in adulthood, he’s ready to “get out there,” but discovers that the dating apps are “supplying tantalizing photographs of men he can’t attract,” though he recognizes it’s hypocritical to complain because he’s also only attracted to tall, masculine men of certain races. “[H]is complicity neutralizes his claim to oppression,” the narrator explains. “But he feels excluded nonetheless, and the more he browses, the more desperate he becomes, and the clearer the problem gets.”

Here again is an irreconcilable conflict between desire and morality. Though Kant does manage to land himself a hot boyfriend: Julian, a white Dartmouth grad with mystery money, a commitment to open communication, and casually racist friends. They meet at the gym, where Julian is at ease and Kant is wearing a bathing suit, a self-conscious first-timer who needs to be rescued from the squat rack. Seeking power, Kant is humiliated instead.

He feels inadequate in his relationship with Julian—a top at heart but a bottom in the power dynamic, given his lack of inexperience and his relative lack of privilege—and too burdened by the degraded nature of his desires to act on them, even as Julian tries to tease them out, claiming to be game for anything. Tulathimutte is no one-trick pony: he writes couple conflicts, friend group meltdowns, and loner decay with equal power, across the identity spectrum.

Kant recognizes that the life he wants—house, husband, kids—is “entirely incompatible with his hideous desires,” so he conceals them from Julian, sneaking out of his bed “at 2 a.m. to watch porn on his phone and glumly ejaculate in the bathroom into a tissue wadded around the tip of his cock like a silencer.” Tulathimutte achieves rare pathos writing about this pervert with such frankness, honesty, and humor. Kant is sympathetic, tragic even, despite the extremity of his desires, not because he’s traumatized, but because he’s self-aware: “For [Kant,] sex is not play, and not sports, nor even work—sex will always be a trial, ending in a verdict.” The issue isn’t embarrassment; it’s shame, which “soaks, stains, leaves a skidmark on everything and, when it has nothing to stick to, spreads until it does. […] Embarrassment is an event, shame a condition.”

After a botched attempt at sex, Kant leaves Julian’s apartment forever and retreats fully into porn. His tastes are highly specific, so he composes a 6,000-word custom video request to send to a porn actor. Here’s a sampling:

It’s not that you enjoy the public shame or the prospect of getting your hole ripped apart, you’re just so forlornly in thrall, in such a hopeless nadir of lust and degradation, that you are suddenly willing to sacrifice everything, you lose all hope for your life apart from deepthroating my cock and ingurgitating gallon after gallon of my foul cum. Your expression should convey that.

The video request is not merely nasty—it inverts various humiliations from his relationship with Julian so that in the fantasy, Kant does the humiliating. This section is one of the filthiest, funniest things I’ve ever read, and it’s also deeply sad and not just some shock jock gag.

Kant accidentally emails the video request to his family, friends, and colleagues, and that’s where the story ends, with Kant suspended in the last moments of his old life. This is his real coming-out—he has actually revealed himself to everyone now, only he hasn’t realized it yet. It’s a classic story construction executed perfectly with new tools, and even a little hopeful.

Tulathimutte writes in a close third-person perspective in these first three sections, creating a measure of distance that is both ironic and thematically significant. These are the loneliest characters in Rejection, stuck inside their heads and rooms; they’re incapable of speaking the truth of their desires (intentionally, anyway), so Tulathimutte brings us into their skulls.

But don’t let the profanity of Rejection fool you—this is serious fiction. Craig, Alison, and Kant are intelligent and self-reflective, but their self-awareness is tragically incomplete, and so they suffer along on perverted journeys in pursuit of happiness. “Pornsick,” alienated, and very online, these characters seek out ways of being that transcend the strictures of identity while the abyss of the internet seems to sap the light of their souls. Tulathimutte never gets preachy, though. There’s no moral panic here; he’s too smart for that, attacking impostures of virtue—particularly the performance of identity politics—without offering prescriptions, thank God.

Speaking of morality: Craig and Alison are pretty contemptible, but you never get the sense that the writer holds them in contempt, though Tulathimutte was careful to distance himself from red-pill heterodoxy with a precautionary tweet before “The Feminist” was published in n+1. He’s not out here constructing little straw men just to torture them on the page. The prose is bouncy, slangy, and fun—my margins are crowded with check marks and exclamation points—but he doesn’t invite us to delight in the suffering of the characters, nor does he push a corny Empathy for All agenda. It’s more that the delightful prose entices us to enter dark rooms with trash cans full of cummy tissues and consider the rejected people slithering through life with sore necks and wrists and no friends.

The one exception is the (37M) tech-bro narrator of “Our Dope Future,” which is the book’s weakest section, presented as a Reddit post. Tulathimutte hates this guy; we all do. His lack of awareness is a choice, a counterpose that stresses the relationship between rejection and self-examination, and this narrator has experienced zero rejection, but the blaccent and grindset lingo of his post reads like lower satire than the rest.

Rejection takes a hard meta turn in the last narrative section of the book, “Main Character,” which depicts Bee’s attempt to renounce identity—race, gender, name, everything—and reject the world, not through violence but through dissolution via a mass dissemination of fake accounts. Bee is Kant’s sibling and Craig’s QPOC agender (non)friend. After “[selling] their gender” to a classmate in grade school, coming to recognize the dead-end indignities of assimilation, and frustrating their co-op housemates at Stanford by refusing to identify as “nonbinary,” Bee takes to the internet full-time, creating a vast web of tens of thousands of fake accounts that ensnare real people in online controversies with no flesh-and-bone actors.

Or maybe Bee doesn’t exist. Tulathimutte frames the primary narrative of “Main Character” in a forum discussion: the “Botkin” sleuths—a Pale Fire reference—of an unnamed forum have several theories about Bee’s identity, including that they’re a creation of Thai American novelist Tony Tulathimutte.

In addition to Pale Fire, “Main Character” recalls Dennis Cooper’s novel The Sluts (2004), which takes the form of online reviews for male escorts—but I’m cheating; I heard Tulathimutte name that influence at a Q and A. The metaplay in “Main Character” rocks, but I could’ve done without the self-conscious turn of “Re: Rejection” in which Tulathimutte produces a rejection letter for the book you’ve just read, implicating himself and anticipating all possible criticism, including everything I’ve offered here. But all my gripes are minor. This is a distinctive work by a major writer, and I expect to return to it for years to come.

Tulathimutte has been compared to Philip Roth, but that’s only because of the masturbation scenes. With his maximalist style and twisting intelligence, he’s more like David Foster Wallace. The propulsive, acidic wit brought Thomas Bernhard and Gary Indiana to mind, and the serious engagement with online life and mean humor reminded me of Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts (2021). But there’s nothing recycled here; Tulathimutte is singular.

I’ve worked at a bunch of bookstores, so I’ve witnessed too many readings. Most of them are pretty boring. Even if I’m interested in the writer or book, my attention usually drifts. “I’ll read it later,” I tell myself if I’m not tuned out altogether or trying to keep my eyes from rolling out of my face. But earlier this year, I heard Tulathimutte read from “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression,” and that was different, totally arresting and hilarious. The whole crowd was captivated—he had us scream-laughing like a stand-up audience, and his fancy prose style reminded me of Nabokov if Nabokov had been born late enough to become obsessed with porn instead of butterflies.