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Re: Rejection

Re: Rejection

A formally inventive satire of the reject class.

06 Sep

Terry Nguyen on Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection.

I forgot how I first came to believe that the world consists of two kinds of people: the heartbreakers and the heartbroken. It’s easy to be persuaded by such dualistic thinking in adolescence, to blame one’s misfortunes on the unfair hand of fate. I was one of the perpetually heartbroken. My whole personality seemed to repel both friends and love interests alike. The bulk of my teenage years was spent stewing in the shame of feeling unwanted, charmless, and ugly. This is not a unique feeling, especially not among fifteen-year-olds. But shame isolates any sense of self-perception like blinders on a horse. It traps you in a prison of your own psychological pain.

Tony Tulathimutte’s latest story collection, aptly titled Rejection, contends with the shame-ridden rot at the root of rejection. “Rejection isn’t the same as heartbreak, which entails a past acceptance,” Tulathimutte writes in a Paris Review essay on the book’s thematic fixation. “A rejection implies that you don’t even warrant a try.” (Rejection, I would argue, is a subgenre of heartbreak.) As a result, his characters are rendered inert—and in a few cases, driven insane—by this burden, as they debase themselves in pursuit of unrequited fantasies.

For the reject, the story stalls even as it interminably continues, like a car in gridlock traffic.

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According to Tulathimutte, the rejection plot is “all buildup and no closure,” which lacks the narrative gravitas of real loss. Rather, “the lack of happening is the tragedy.” Rejection’s loosely-linked stories grapple with this characteristic failure —the inability to form and maintain relationships as a consequence of rejecting rejection—as Tulathimutte considers how rejection may be the defining state of our time. The result is a wildly entertaining, occasionally outlandish, and formally inventive satire of the reject class.

For the reject, the story stalls even as it interminably continues, like a car in gridlock traffic. Curiously, the antidote to rejection that Tulathimutte mentions in the book’s final story—acceptance—fails to fully materialize in the collection. Readers instead have to wallow in the stilted environment of the reject's parallel reality, “the absence of plot” that further confirms their irrelevance.

ALL AMERICAN REJECTS