Enter the Void: Morality and Loneliness in the Digital Age

On Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection

Hopper, Edward. Excursion into Philosophy, 1959. Private Collection

by Finn Flackett-Levin

It is abundantly evident that we live in an age of unprecedented social division. Mainstream media on both sides of the aisle has belabored this point so thoroughly that it feels almost needless to say. Division as a sociological phenomenon is certainly not unique to our epoch; it is one of those perennial aspects of human experience that cannot help but continuously rear its ugly head. However, no one would contest that this eternal affliction has now become, in America especially, a terminal threat to civic life. The New York Times, possibly the most notable arbiter of ‘the way we live now,’ devoted 5000 words to the American “loneliness epidemic.” Lauren Greenfield’s recent documentary series Social Studies delineates in unsparing fashion the vice grip of technology on members of Generation Z and how the supplanting of real-world experience with digital interactions has eroded their ability to find common ground with their peers. The technological advancement of the internet has defined the advent of the 21st century for good and, increasingly, for ill. 

Perhaps, given all of these troublesome factors, it makes sense why artists feel such a reticence to engage with the contemporary at this juncture. One look at the upper echelon of the cinema landscape, the art form that most accurately reflects the desires of the public at large, and it is clear that the reigning auteurs have no interest in depicting the present. August directors such as Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, and Paul Thomas Anderson have not made a movie set in a contemporary milieu in more than a decade. While this could be chalked up to the fact that cell phones and electric cars aren’t particularly suited to visual representation, we must also consider the possibility that even for the brightest artistic minds working today, modernity and its discontents are simply too much to bear. 

In this context of the media’s stultifying avoidance of confronting the damage wrought by social media and the internet’s all-pervasive influence, Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte feels like a breath of fresh air. Tulathimutte, prior to Rejection’s publication, was an undoubtedly admired but obscure writer who wielded influence in the hermetic Brooklyn literary scene via his position as the founder of CRIT, a writer’s workshop that has gained considerable prestige in the eight years since its inception. Of course, the irony of  Tulathimutte writing the book that may be considered the last word on the fraught subject of rejection is that he has become a de facto gatekeeper of a niche subsection of the New York publishing world, regularly doling out rejection letters himself. Consider this a form of prolonged research: Tulathimutte knows his subject like the back of his hand, not only in his administrative capacity at CRIT but also in his own self-publicized struggles to get his books published. By Tulathimutte’s own account, his debut novel Private Citizens was rejected nineteen times before finally getting published in 2016 by William Morrow. The accumulation of rejections that Tulathimutte has suffered seems not just to have unfazed him but emboldened him. 

The same cannot be said for the characters in Rejection itself, a misanthropic collection of millennial neurotics who, over the course of the book’s seven distinct yet interrelated chapters, implode in a breathtaking variety of self-inflicted ways. The unnamed narrator of the opening section ‘The Feminist’ (in a later story we discover his identity) adopts the lingua franca of male feminist allyship in a gradually more desperate attempt not just to find a girlfriend but also to achieve some measure of social cohesion with a generation he feels alienated from. In ‘Pics,’ a one-night stand leads Alison down the rabbit hole of psychosexual obsession toward a friend who feels markedly indifferent toward her. In what is perhaps the most revelatory yet delightfully sickening story in the collection entitled ‘Ahegao, or, The  Ballad of Sexual Repression,’ a withdrawn young Thai American man named Kant (subtlety isn’t Tulathimutte’s main objective here) struggles to lose his virginity given his outré taste in pornography, a taste that has made it so intercourse is nearly impossible given the astonishing complexity and barbarity of his sexual desires.  

These unnerving tales play out not solely in the physical plane but also in the digital realm, a world all the characters feel more comfortable in given their bone-deep sense of estrangement from the world around them. One of the most notable examples of Tulathimutte interspersing his prose with a simulacrum of unedited electronic discourse is the snippets of group chat conversations among Alison and her coterie of girlfriends in ‘Pics.’ Tulathimutte has an incredible ear for how those who outwardly espouse progressive viewpoints show a far less empathetic disposition behind closed doors. Look, for instance, at a text about the man Alison recently hooked up with sent by one of her supposed friends: 

Anjali 

okay yes now that it is safe to say so . . . . I kinda thought that  guy seemed sus lmao 

didn’t you say he works with pedos? literally who signs up to do that 

middling ass softboi 

While it is easy to lampoon a man who derives a sense of moral superiority from working in a halfway house for recently castrated pedophiles, Tulathimutte is an equal opportunity offender committed to skewering both those who deliberately live their lives in such a way as to net the maximum amount of social justice clout and the people who deride them out of insecurity that they are not living their lives in accordance with their much-touted principles. The fact that Anjali ends her missive by taking a swipe at the man’s masculinity further reifies how the lexicon of the internet enables such people to deride those they seek to invalidate in a fashion seemingly incompatible with their beliefs. On top of that, the friend group repeatedly disregards Alison’s viewpoint in the ensuing pile-on that takes place, refusing to acknowledge the fact that this apparent commitment to selflessness and charity attracted Alison to him in the first place. Online discourse, be it in a text chain or a chat room, inevitably leads to people seeking confirmation of their own biases as opposed to engaging in the fruitful yet more challenging endeavor of genuine conversation.

For all of this harping on Tulathimutte’s facility, there are times when his prodigious reach exceeds its grasp. The shocking denouement of ‘The Feminist,’ where the narrator’s growing disaffection metastasizes into violent rage, takes what had been a nuanced portrayal of how lonely men can easily get swept up in the tide of masculine resentment found on Reddit forums and turns it into a piece engineered to be a flashpoint in the culture wars (it’s not for nothing that ‘The Feminist’ was the most read story in n+1’s history at the time of publication).  The section of the book entitled ‘Main Character’ starts as a promising window into the psyche of Bee, a person who refuses to have any label ascribed to them, be it race or gender or even to some extent the label of personhood, and ends up outstaying its welcome by laboriously underlining its central points many times over and getting caught up in a breakdown of a convoluted online trolling scheme. The penultimate chapter ‘Sixteen Metaphors’ is exactly that, a series of one-line metaphors about rejection that registers as a mildly amusing curio and nothing more. The final section ‘Re: Rejection’ is a fictional letter from a publisher outlining all the reasons they have decided to pass on the manuscript of  Rejection while also giving insipid notes as to how to increase the likability of the characters and how to inject more pathos into the overall narrative. This postscript somewhat works metatextually but feels more than anything like an awkward victory lap on Tulathimutte’s part,  celebrating his own iconoclasm in the face of corporatized mediocrity. 

The section that best exemplifies how Tulathimutte’s social commentary exists on a razor’s edge between profundity and pretension is ‘Our Dope Future,’ the monologue of a man who speaks only in the affected patois of bogus self-improvement. As he tells the reader about why his last relationship (with Alison from ‘Pics’) fell apart, it becomes clear that he uses the superficial desire to better the lives of those around him as a cover for his manipulative tendencies. When he starts to suspect that Alison’s depressive lethargy stems from a potential chemical imbalance, he swabs her cheek without her consent to attain further information and then uses a program called WristSlapp to monitor her online communications. At the end of  the story, all of his close relationships have dissipated as a result of his insatiable need for control, and he asks the following question: “Tell me, after all the value I’ve created, and the  best-in-class innovations I have successfully brought to market, and the inspiration I have  brought up by my example—if everything I did was so evil, how is it that up until now not a  single person has told me No?” 

This question simultaneously confronts the reader and acts as a kind of thematic lodestar for Rejection as a whole. The fragmented nature of contemporary discourse drives social division but also renders everyone an accommodationist, too concerned with their own myopic conceptions of virtue to recognize injustices perpetrated just under their noses. In the end, the net result of having access to all information all of the time is the understandable impulse to burrow inward and use the internet, or any other tool that aids in fostering alienation, to create a protective shell which even the most salient of points can’t break through. That is why, even when it occasionally falls short of its aims, Rejection cannot be ignored. It shows us, up to the minute, who we are, how we’ve failed, and what we can do to change — if anyone is still listening.