Two things can be true of Tony Tulathimutte’s second book, Rejection. It is a collection of squirm-inducing linked short stories full of self-absorbed, self-sabotaging millennials and it is a laugh-out-loud satire exposing the darker impulses of us all as we bid for connection amid an increasingly bewildering online world.
The first half of the book is written in third person, present tense, a familiar form. It follows characters as they stretch to fulfil romantic targets in ways you predict will end in failure.
You will want to summon empathy for a cringey young man who drags “his virginity like a body bag into his mid-twenties” until his rage replaces a carefully cultivated wokeness once it doesn’t get him laid. Or watch a young, pitiable women acquire a raven, a self-brand for her socials, failing to realise a bird is a wild thing, a “flesh-ripping fiend with a knife for a face”. The likeliest underdog to win your sympathy is the repressed gay man who takes a full year to compose his coming-out email. Betrayal is swift, you will laugh at wickedly hilarious scenes, not least a spanking session and the Deliveroo-style arrival of a sex doll.
Indeed, each character reaches the moment redemption is still possible, but Tulathimutte veers hard, like Richard Harris in The Field, driving his cattle straight off the social cliff of their errors, while you laugh, peeking through the gaps of your fingers in gleeful horrification. No one is spared. Not the author, and not you.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte: Squirm-inducing, laugh-out-loud satirical short stories
The African Revolution: A History of the Long Nineteenth Century by Richard Reid – An erudite and informed work
First there was Ryanair: How the Ryan family came back from the brink and brought low-fare airlines to the world
‘I was a Billie Barry kid. I’d like to be able to do the splits again’
What kind of a morally debased writer generated these outlandish scenes? What kind of a reader remains hooked in such discourse?
[ Private Citizens review: ‘Middlemarch’ for millennialsOpens in new window ]
In the second half, the form shifts its identity. Has this book become self-aware, have you entered a “hall of mirrors”? If you drop a stone into the depravity and toxic wokeness of the internet – is there even a bottom? No. Only a series of worm holes, and prepare, your intelligent and devious author has now taken the keyboard, probing the questions as he brings you into unmapped territory, pitching into gimbal lock at frenetic speeds. Tulathimutte is in full control to the end.
Rejection isn’t even a train wreck. It is an exhilarating trip for the mind. You have been cautioned. Enjoy the ride.
