A Conversation with Tony Tulathimutte

The novelist and short story writer talks "Rejection"

In 2016, I was lolling around Miami on the eve of Florida’s Republican presidential primary. I had time to kill in the March sun, and with me was a new book called Private Citizens. The debut novel of Tony Tulathimutte, a graduate of the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Private Citizens had received a glowing review in New York Magazine, where it was declared something of the first great millenial novel. Wary, if intrigued, I bought the book and began to read; I was not let down. Tulathimutte is a wicked satirist and a deft craftsman of character and interiority. As affectless, forgettable prose came into vogue in the 2010s, autofictions spreading like a plague, Tulathimutte’s send-up of the tech-addled, Bay Area milieu was a refreshing departure. Eight years later, Tulathimutte is back with Rejection, his second book. Classified simply as fiction—it is not described as either a novel or a short story collection, though it reads like an interconnecting set of short stories with a meta-fictive flourish—Rejection is already garnering early buzz, and does not, at its hilarious and scatological peaks, disappoint. The early chapters, in my view, are the very best, particularly his studies of an incel, a spurned young woman, and an outwardly meek man with savagely subversive sexual proclivities. If there is a single theme across the chapters, it’s baked into the title: rejection, and the darkness that encroaches on those who are turned away—or turn themselves away.

Below is my conversation with Tulathimutte, the latest in my series of exchanges with working novelists.

Has technology made romantic rejection worse—or at least feel worse? What do you make of the intersection of technology and romance, and why did you decide to make it such a focus of Rejection? 

I don’t think technology—assuming we're talking about smartphones and the internet here—has made rejection any worse, but it has gotten easier and more common, and produced new forms that we’ve had less time to build an immunity to. If you use a dating app you might reject dozens of people in minutes, and are moreover ambiently aware of your own profile being left-swiped by potentially hundreds of people at all hours. You might meet someone online, get into an intense passionate conversation, and then find yourself randomly blocked the next day, or catfished, or posted to TikTok. I had fun adopting some of the new forms the internet provides, like group chats and Reddit posts and so on, but I didn’t consciously choose to focus on technology, it’s more that it would have felt odd and implausible not to include it, given the milieu of city-dwelling millennials in the 2010s. Also, the internet is just naturally where lonely people go to get lonelier.

Rejection is listed as “fiction” and not as a short story collection or novel, which is unconventional by American standards. What led you to this decision? Why not, like Private Citizens, produce a full-fledged novel with a traditional narrative thread?

When you think about it, “traditional novel” is a bit of an oxymoron. I often say novels are called novels for a reason, and that reason is that it's always generating new forms. I've always thought of Rejection as a novel, in the sense that there is a larger progression to the book beyond its discrete components, but I figured it might have been misleading to readers who expected a single plot arc. My publisher was the one who settled on “Fiction,” which I think is close enough, though you could argue that the book tacks toward nonfiction at the end.

My friend Chris Jesu Lee wrote a great essay about the “Asian American Psycho,” this idea that Asian art that is not American more easily portrays characters who are dark, even bloodthirsty. “The mad, the bloodthirsty, and the depraved are replaced with the sad, the lovesick, and the eager-to-please,” Lee writes. “Asian psychos are great, so long as they remain in Asia ... The lord of a manor, once wicked and unrestrained in his domain, becomes the agreeable and obsequious guest.” What do you make of contemporary portrayals of Asian Americans in fiction? Where do you think your work fits in?

I can’t make generalizations about two continents’ worth of literature. I think it's fair to say that until very recently there were certain types of narratives expected of Asian American writers, sought after and rewarded by white liberal publishing, that were presumed to represent “the Asian American experience,” whatever that is. (Nam Le writes about this in his story about an Iowa Writers’ Workshop student pressured to write an immigrant sob story, in which a writing instructor sums it up: “Ethnic literature’s hot. And important too.”). In Rejection the novella “Main Character” evinces some skepticism about this notion that one person’s experience of an identity can ever adequately represent another’s, and that the expectation to represent others is a good thing, though it leaves open the question of whether you can avoid it, even if you try. 

Anyway, I think literature is defined by its exceptions rather than its trends, and if you want dark or unhinged, off the top there’s Jenny Zhang, Richard Chiem, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Alexandra Kleeman, Cassandra Khaw, Karan Mahajan, Alice Sola Kim... Also shoutout to Andrea Long Chu who somehow manages to write violent book reviews. This is to say nothing of all the excellent unpublished work I get to see from students—I recently read a truly batshit manuscript by Sunny Lee that I mention here so I can say I was the first. Where do I think I fit in? That is the question, isn’t it. 

Tell me about your choice to pull away from the narrator of the first chapter, a social justice liberal who gradually morphs into a furious incel, right after he dons a ski mask to enter a restaurant. It’s an allusion to a crime, potentially violence, but we never see it. 

It’s funny, since I originally published “The Feminist” in 2019, I had to change “mask” to “ski mask” because people were confusing it for a COVID face mask. In any case, I figured the ski mask made his intentions obvious enough; ending the story on some kind of bloodbath would have felt gratuitous and beside the point. Instead I ended it on the moment just before, when he decides to hold the door open for a woman entering the restaurant, emphasizing the main thing about him—all the way up until the end, he considers himself a good and noble person, having invested so much of his self-concept into this sort of empty, intellectualized chivalry that belies his real intentions.

In another chapter, we meet Kant, a diminutive, repressed gay Thai American man who dreams of sexually dominating others. You write one of the most hilarious and wonderfully insane sexual fantasies I’ve ever read in literature (or anywhere) from the perspective of Kant. I am tempted to reproduce it here in full, but it spans pages and pages, and includes a phallus so gigantic, it casts a shadow over the Earth’s surface and generates enough thermal energy to somehow reverse climate change. In this fantasy, Kant has made another man—conventionally attractive, formerly straight—his “suck-slave.” How did you come to write Kant as a character? Take me through the process of constructing this piece.

This story follows after two stories about people who are chronically rejected, and I wanted to pivot and think about a character who is so repressed after a lifetime of rejection that he can’t handle or even recognize acceptance. He meets a perfectly nice and generous guy who is attracted to him, but Kant has so deeply internalized the belief in his own unworthiness and unattractiveness that he finds ways to sabotage this wide-open invitation. It was important to me to make the ending excessive and spectacular to drive home what I thought was a crucial point—when Kant says his desires are impossible to fulfill, he’s not really wrong. A more confident person might believe himself better capable of adapting and maturing his tastes, but Kant fully abandons himself to unreality.

Another highlight of Rejection is Alison, whose casual sexual relationship with a friend, Neil, eventually turns her bitter. When writing Alison, you approximate groupchat language, particularly from the perspective of women, better than any I’ve found in recent literature. “Internet writing” tends to leave me flat, but this did not. How do you write to mimic the language of the internet? What is your approach? 

Well, “approximate” is the right word, because I’m not in a position to make any judgments about how accurately I portray other people’s voices. I just do what every writer does and make careful guesses, relying on my friends and editors to alert me to whatever sounds fake. It’s helpful to be immersed in what you’re writing about, and read it aloud a lot. I think I saw somewhere that Eleanor Catton read only contemporaneous 18th century prose while she was writing The Luminaries, and the same approach goes for any style of writing. I guess what I'm trying to say is, I am online all fucking day.

At book’s end, we take a meta-fictive turn. What motivated you there? Why are we reading a fictional rejection letter for Rejection that critiques the stories themselves? 

Because the book doesn’t describe a conventional plot arc, I had to think of another way to provide closure to the book that brought all of the earlier material to bear, and I thought a rejection letter would be an elegant way to do it. It fit the overall M.O. of perversity for the book to sabotage itself, and it was fun to see if I could come up with a bad faith reading that was convincing on its own terms.

There’s been internet discourse of late around the state of literature when it comes to the young male (heterosexual, in particular) perspective. Some have argued, in newer American novels, masculinity (toxicity, warts, and all) is disappearing. Do you agree? Disagree? Why do you think young men read less fiction than young women? 

I don’t think it's disappearing at all. Plenty of recent books and stories are centrally about heterosexual masculinity in one form or another. Just off the top of my head there’s Teddy Wayne’s The Winner and Loner, Andrew Martin's Early Work, Jackie Ess's Darryl, Ben Nugent’s Fraternity, Jamel Brinkley's A Lucky Man, Kristen Roupenian's “The Good Guy,” Isle McElroy's The Atmospherians, Beth Morgan's A Touch of Jen, Julius Taranto's How I Won a Nobel Prize, Paolo Iacovelli's The King of Video Poker, Hansen Shi's The Expat, Atticus Lish’s Preparation for the Next Life, Adelle Waldman's The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P, every Ben Lerner novel, most Michel Houellebecq novels, and on and on. If anything’s changed it’s maybe that the theme of masculinity is treated more ambivalently and critically, but that’s just a reflection of broader attitudes toward it. As for why young men read less fiction than young women, I think that's probably of less concern than the overall decline of serious reading, and the dwindling venues for publication.