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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4003 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 12, 2025

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I missed this review when you first posted it, but having just read Rejection, my thoughts:

  1. I generally agree with you that the first few stories are the strongest, and the metafictional ones at the tail end are weaker.

  2. I enjoyed the AITA? story more than you, but I took it as the absurdist satire it was. Yes, dunking on Elon Musk expies is kind of old now, but I still thought it was funny.

  3. About the third story, Ahegao. I agree that the final sequence, describing the main character's increasingly deranged and over-the-top sex fantasies, went on longer than necessary. At a certain point I kind of checked out, just chuckling going "Really? Really?" I think Tulathimutte was probably having too much fun writing it, and the point was that the main character had gone so far down his fetishistic rabbit hole he could no longer see sunlight, and the fact that he just went on and on was hammering home the absurdity. Did it go on too long? Sure, probably could have made the same point with 30% less jizz.

  4. I am not sure how accurate your assumptions about Tulathimutte are. Unless you have some external sources for this, I am always a bit wary of projecting too much into an author based on what they write. Some authors do bleed their hearts out onto the page, others very deliberately write characters and themes that are not reflective of their actual beliefs at all, and some try to fake you out about it, with varying degrees of skill and success. R.F. Kuang, for example, in Yellowface, writes about a white woman stealing an Asian woman's manuscript and literally appropriating her story about the Chinese experience in World War II. Kuang makes it very obvious that the Asian woman is a self-insert, and then tries to hang a lampshade on her by making her kind of unlikeable and fake (and also killing her off in the first chapter), and then she has another Asian woman make a big obvious self-serving villain speech about how hard it is for pampered rich Asian girls with Ivy League degrees to get respect in the publishing industry, but Kuang isn't fooling anyone, it's still an angry book about the publishing industry privileging white women over Asian women. So as for Tulathimutte, he's smarter and a better writer than Kuang, and obviously is, like Kuang, trying to anticipate and deflect inferences like yours (hence the metafictional final story, which I agree did protest too much). But the stuff about him being a rage-filled incel who especially hates white men who date Asian women? I mean, maybe? But I don't think the short stories in Rejection are enough evidence of that.

I have not read Private Citizen, and I think I will.

I still thought it was funny.

For clarity, I did think the AITA story was funny, and I was laughing at the absurdity of it throughout. It wasn't so much that it was bad as just a little out of place: it would have been perfectly fine as a self-contained story. Even if the protagonist's "love interest" had been someone other than Alison (e.g. Linda, one of the protagonists of Private Citizens would have been a better fit), I think it would have been stronger for it: "Pics" is such a depressingly down-to-earth, plausible series of events, it just strained credibility for me that its protagonist could then immediately wander into this over-the-top absurdist satire. Imagine a hypothetical episode of The Wire which crosses over with Twin Peaks and that was pretty much my reaction.

Unless you have some external sources for this

I follow him on Instagram. Granted that I might be falling for the parasociality trap, but in my view he really does seem to do the whole "ha ha I'm ever so lonely ha ha" gag a bit too often for it to be wholly insincere. I could be way off-base.

I expanded on this review a bit with the intention of submitting it to Scott's book review contest, only to find out he's not running it this year. Quoting from my expanded review:

Obviously Tulathimutte was worried that he didn’t go far enough [in attempting to distance himself from The Feminist], so he labours the point by making various edits to “The Feminist” from its original publication, in order to put further distance between himself and the character (a strategy which, as mentioned above, he more or less cops to in the book’s closing “rejection letter”). In its original incarnation, I believe the titular character was intended to be read as Thai-American, given the way his Tinder bio mentioned how much he enjoyed cooking Thai food (which he presumably learned in the course of his Thai upbringing). This meant that the story was just as much about the sexual frustrations of Asian-American men unsuccessfully pursuing white American women as it was about the incel/Nice Guy™ experience more broadly. But in Rejection, The Feminist has been retconned into being a white man named Craig, and his Tinder bio now states that he enjoys Thai food, rather than Thai cooking. Likewise the fact that the Tinder bio is stuffed with broad yuk-yuk jokes (to show off his feminist credentials, the character describes himself as “Abortion’s #1 fan”) which were absent from its original publication: these are meant to reassure the reader that we’re dealing with a caricature, not an uncomfortably believable character who could easily serve as a stand-in for Tulathimutte himself.

To put it another way: I can imagine “Trans women are women (duh)” and “All body types very welcome!” appearing in Tulathimutte’s own Tinder bio, even if meant insincerely. “Abortion’s #1 fan”? Not a chance – he’s not that socially inept and clueless.

...

I have not read Private Citizens, and I think I will.

I can hardly recommend it highly enough. When thinking of all the books I've read in the past five years, I think the only one I enjoyed more is possibly Never Let Me Go. Obviously it was bound to be a tough act to follow.

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