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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4002 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 12, 2025

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So, what are you reading?

I'm trying to finish Alan Watt's The Wisdom of Insecurity. I wasn't impressed the first time I tried it, but his work on Zen changed my image of him in a positive way. Still slowly going through my backlog.

Earlier this week I finished Tony Tulathimutte's second book Rejection. I have thoughts on it, and this seems like as good a place as any for a "review".

I first became aware of Tulathimutte when someone on the Motte (back in the Reddit era) shared his short story "The Feminist", which I loved and shared with everyone I knew. My sister bought me his first novel Private Citizens (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Citizens_(novel)) for my birthday that year, which I adored, tearing through it in two days (unusually fast for me) and have repeatedly recommended. Naturally I was very excited for his second book, which is a collection of seven loosely connected short stories/novellas, of which (to bring it full circle) "The Feminist" is the first.

When I started reading it, I was glad that my eager anticipation wasn't misplaced: "The Feminist" was just as good on a second (or fourth or fifth, most likely) read, although it's been lightly edited from its original publication, namely by extending out the description of the protagonist's Tinder bio. This felt a bit like over-egging the pudding a smidge, but hardly a fatal misstep. The second story is even better, a masterpiece of cringe comedy drama which I found almost physically painful to read as its hapless protagonist digs herself into ever deeper holes, and was by far the strongest in the collection. It was the third story where I started to have some doubts. Its opening is very strong, with a sympathetic portrayal of the kind of private hell experienced by a man whose fetishes are so warped that they are not merely difficult but physically impossible to accomplish (I've never felt more grateful to be so vanilla in my appetites) and a description of the difference between embarrassment and shame that stopped me in my tracks. Unfortunately, it concludes with an extended sequence of gross-out humour which is, without exaggeration, the most disgusted I've felt reading a work of fiction since either American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis or (a much less flattering comparison) Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk. There were a few gross bits in Private Citizens, but they were used in moderation for context and flavour in a largely funny, perceptive and empathetic novel, and didn't outstay their welcome (such that I didn't feel uncomfortable lending the book to my mum). But this sequence goes on far longer than needed for the joke to land, and just felt like Tulathimutte trying to be shocking and puerile for no good reason. It could have been half as long (or one quarter) and lost nothing.

The fourth story is framed as an Am I the Asshole? post on Reddit and is narrated by a tech bro protagonist who, like Tulathimutte, spends far too much time online, communicating entirely through a dizzying range of Internet slang - not for nothing does the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rejection_(short_story_collection)) refer to it as a "terminally online... brainrot" novel (although people in glass houses: the fact that I was able to understand the entire thing without once consulting Urban Dictionary is probably a red flag that I need to cut down on my social media consumption). It's an amusing once-off gag, but I couldn't help but feel that it disrupted the verisimilitude: the protagonist just feels like too broad a parody to exist in the same universe as the other more grounded characters, and the story's dénouement too overtly farcical. (As Chris Jesu Lee pointed out, in 2024, a satirical joke story taking aim at tech bros for being cod-visionary and obliviously sociopathic seems a bit behind the times - by this stage we're practically drowning in arrogant, deluded Elon Musk expies.) The rest of the book consists largely of meta postmodern navel-gazing, culminating in a final chapter which is framed as an excessively detailed rejection (ha ha) letter from a publisher for the book you are currently reading. Here, the fictional publisher deconstructs the creepy subtext for all of the preceding stories, bluntly asserting that Tulathimutte's attempts to mask his own neuroses, paraphilias and worldview by putting them in the mouths of fictional characters who are unlike him on one or more identity axes is blindingly transparent and fooling no one. This chapter essentially comes off as Tulathimutte attempting to head off criticism about the book, to which the reader might reasonably ask - if you know it's bad, why are you doing it?

It's still a good book, primarily on the strength of the first two-and-a-half stories, and like Private Citizens I read the whole thing in two days, but I do think it's a step down from the debut. One thing I found particularly disconcerting about the book was its Bukowski-esque disgust for human bodies and the corporeal form, its "relaxed contempt for the flesh" (to quote Gibson). Offhand I can think of only one actual character in the whole book who isn't described as being in some way physically repulsive, unclean or similar - so of course she's a superficial airheaded bimbo who comes in for ire for misspelling and misusing the word "négligée". It doesn't surprise me at all that Tulathimutte is an outspoken advocate for trans rights - he doesn't merely believe that some people are born in the wrong bodies, but that everyone is born in the wrong body: the wrong body is any human body which actually exists, and the Internet, porn and video games are wonderful inventions in large part because they enable us to distract ourselves from the horrific reality of being embodied within these nauseating mechanistic flesh prisons. This is one of the most Gnostic books I've ever read without even trying to be.

Hand in hand with this is the book's profound, omnidirectional misanthropy. I don't believe that every novel needs to have likeable and/or morally upstanding characters: there have been good books in which every character was amoral, unlikeable or both. But the sheer visceral contempt for everyone evinced by Rejection is quite unsettling, leaving an acrid taste in one's mouth, and it's conspicuous by its novelty relative to Private Citizens. No matter how scathing, satirical and acerbic that book was, Tulathimutte's affection for his characters was palpable on every page, and we shared in it even when they made mistakes or behaved shittily - and some of those characters weren't just likeable jerks, but actually did come off as well-meaning people sincerely trying to do their best. Meanwhile, Rejection is not a book about misanthropy, but a misanthropic book - essentially every character is a shitty, unlikeable, narcissistic, pretentious, emotionally manipulative asshole. (Offhand I can only think of one major character who seems even a little bit likeable and basically decent, and they aren't the protagonist of any of the stories.) Given that most of them are so similar along other axes too (generally lonely, too online, never exercise, physically unattractive and know it), the colour and variety from Private Citizens is also rather lacking. It's not a monotonous read, but pentatonic where Private Citizens was chromatic and modal.

Here's what I took from it. However he might try to ironize and joke about his lifestyle and shortcomings, I sincerely believe the following:

  1. Tulathimutte agrees with every word The Feminist says, although he'd never admit it. When The Feminist went on a rant about how women have stolen incels' lives by selfishly defecting from the social contract, Tulathimutte was not bravely delving into the psychology of a character with whom he disagreed, attempting to express what that character thinks in such a way that it would pass the intellectual Turing test: he was simply using a fictional character as a mouthpiece for his own opinions. The event which concludes "The Feminist" is intended as plausible deniability for Tulathimutte by having his unsettlingly reasonable-seeming character jump off the slippery slope.
  2. Repeated romantic rejection has hardened Tulathimutte's spirit, filling him with rage and bitterness towards anyone and everyone, but especially the happily coupled. This misanthropic streak was detectable as subtext in Private Citizens but kept somewhat in check (there's nothing particularly unusual about being unmarried in your early thirties, as he was at the time of publication); but having entered his fourth decade still going stag, Tulathimutte has essentially gone mad from the isolation, and lonely people are the bitterest of all (to quote Nick Hornby).
  3. Asian women who date white men fill Tulathimutte with murderous rage, which he knows is wrong and yet cannot even begin to suppress or talk himself out of: there's a near-constant subtext that said women are contemptible, duplicitous and lacking in self-respect for some reason that Tulathimutte refuses to explicitly articulate, not even by using one of his numerous unsympathetic characters as a mouthpiece for it. (The closest we get is a white character who, after being rejected by a white man in favour of an Asian woman, cattily accuses him of racial fetishism, for which she is widely criticised; the fact that she gets so much pushback struck me as a bit of a fig leaf.) I've read two reviews of this book by Asian-American men who barely touched on this aspect of the book, and I strongly suspect it's because they feel the same way but, like Tulathimutte, are perceptive enough to realise it's not polite to just come out and say so. If I was an Asian woman who'd dated one or more white men, I imagine I'd find this already intentionally discomfiting book even more uncomfortable than the average reader would - but then Jia Tolentino loved it, so what do I know.
  4. Many years of excessive porn consumption have imbued Tulathimutte with unrealistic expectations about sex (to put it mildly): a set of fetishes no human woman could ever hope to meet. His ideal woman has a neotonous face, impossibly large breasts, impossibly smooth skin, not a single follicle of hair below the eyelashes, never talks back, is always on hand to fulfil any sexual demand he might make of her (without being too slutty about things), and never farts, belches, menstruates, pees or poos. He's spent so long in the virtual world of Bang Bros that even perfectly normal women (even women who are above average in attractiveness) probably fill him with disgust and loathing.

If you liked Private Citizens, pick it up. If you haven't read anything by him, please read Private Citizens first, as it's superior in every way that matters.

With all that off my chest, to directly answer the original question - I'm currently about a third of the way through Magda Szabo's novel Katalin Street, which I went into more or less blind. For some reason I'm having far more difficulty keeping track of which character is which than any other novel I've read in the past few years. Seems decent so far.

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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