Since its release in 2024, Rejection by Thai-American writer Tony Tulathimutte has been described variously as repulsive and excruciating, humorous and virtuosic.
It can’t be any more apt that a book dividing the internet is about the internet – the ways the web simultaneously connects and isolates, where the boundaries between belonging and exclusion are one subreddit away.
A collection of interconnected short stories, Rejection details ‘normal people’ who slowly fade to the fringes of society, their lives dwindling from unobtainable love, their suffering exacerbated by perfect, social media-filtered personas and the pursuit of so-called authenticity in a world where identity is the commodity.
Rejection starts off with The Feminist, first published in n+1 Magazine in 2019, pre-dating the internet-meme-cum-cultural-interrogation of ‘performative males’ in 2025.
Even when the protagonist is a white cis male feminist wannabe who cannot accept anything other than romantic attachment for his allyship, Tulathimutte’s intimate narrative does not let readers off the hook with pure hatred. Instead, we wither alongside The Feminist inside his sticky, closed-off mind space; his perversely deteriorating body; and his increasingly extremist tendencies.
While Tulathimutte’s characters are pitiful, sympathy is not the end goal. Understanding becomes morally challenging when The Feminist ends in suggested violence.
In the story Pics, sisterhood is tainted when racism, obsessiveness, eating disorders and attention-hoarding brew up a depressing concoction for the protagonist .
In Rejection, notably, the author does not side with his characters. Leaning into this, the book becomes an exposé of what has become a cultural phenomenon – the spotlight has moved away from the relatable to the unbearable, with more at play than shock value.
Tulathimutte: a fictional reality check
Tulathimutte’s fourth story in Rejection, Our Dope Future, reads less like fiction and more like an ominous byproduct of our contemporary digital landscape, intersecting with the chilling realities exposed in Louis Theroux’s recent documentary, Inside the Manosphere.
Taking the form of a Reddit post, Our Dope Future‘s protagonist is a chronically-capitalist grindsetter who treats relationships like a dataset to be optimised. He is the manifestation of the tech-bro misogyny that not only proliferates, but is celebrated, among the supposedly hyper-masculine content creators captured by Manosphere, who feel disadvantaged by the notion of gender equality and choose the ‘red pill’ to reaffirm their alpha status.
These real-world influencers weaponise digital echo chambers and algorithms, targeting young men’s isolation to radicalise resentment, posing their own wealth, visibility and ‘rizz’ as a worthy and unsurpassable end goal. Tulathimutte’s narrative details the endpoint of that type of coercion with a satisfying, thought-provoking twist.
Tulathimutte: ‘freely awful’ characters speak a greater truth
When Tulathimutte wrote his debut novel, Private Citizens (2016), he set out some parameters for his characters, one of which was that they would be ‘freely awful‘. During his Melbourne appearance at The Wheeler Centre on 19 May, he described those characters in Rejection as ‘worthy adversaries’.
Tulathimutte takes a meticulous approach to capturing characters’ quirks, however toxic, obsessive or pathetic. Themes are emergent rather than the building blocks of his writing process, and he told his Melbourne audience that it took six or seven years before it became clear to him what he was trying to get at in Rejection‘s opening story.
When he first started drafting The Feminist in 2011, mainstream culture was shifting its spotlight from the ‘sincere underdogs’ and ‘Mr Nice Guys’ of the mid-2000s – think Ted Mosby, the hopeless romantic in How I Met Your Mother or Leonard Hofstadter, the nerd who gets the girl in The Big Bang Theory – to cookie-cutter progressive heroes in the 2010s like 13 Reasons Why’s Clay Jensen, which faced backlash.
The Feminist, seen in this light, is a wake up call from a 20-year hangover. A generation that was brought up on the idea that being a ‘good, progressive guy’ would guarantee a happy ending was thrown into bitter relief when love, status, wealth and respect didn’t come as a reward for their virtue.
A contrast to this kind of earnestness is Bee in Tulathimutte’s story Main Character, who Tulathimutte called his most worthy adversary and who sits at the radical end of rejecting convention after attempting (unsuccessfully) to find a sense of belonging with the rebels, the hippies and the progressives.
With a dizzying level of internet savviness, Bee launches an avalanche of internet hoaxes that multiplies their online presence and effectively eradicates the chance of singular identification – a ‘fuck you’ to being categorised and caricatured through race, gender, sexual orientation, political views etcetera etcetera.
Bee knows all too well: that learning the language of therapy and social justice doesn’t actually make anyone happier or more worthy of love.
