Rejecting Rejection
The late philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known for his concept of the rhizome, defined as a network that connects any point to any other point. The most obvious example of a rhizome is the internet: instead of having a linear structure, the internet allows any page to be connected to another page, forming a vast interconnected ecosystem with no clear beginning and end.
Books, on the other hand, seem like the opposite of rhizomes. We all know what our literature teachers told us about story structure: stories have an exposition, a rising action, a climax, and a conclusion. Yet Tony Tulathimutte’s new short story collection, Rejection, is a rejection of the standard structure. His book is fully rhizomatic, with characters from some stories popping up out of nowhere in other stories, plot lines interweaving, always surprising the reader as to what will show up next. Some stories will take on completely different meanings when read twice. Both Deleuze’s name and the concept of the rhizome make brief wink-and-nudge appearances, letting the reader know that Tulathimutte is in fact intentional in engineering his book’s structural—or perhaps post-structural—nature.
Rejection of traditional narrative structure isn’t the only rejection this book performs on a meta level. In an era where romance novels reign supreme in the publishing industry, with throngs of readers entranced by stories about reaching the throes of a happily-ever-after love, Rejection is a big bucket of cold water splashed onto the entire industry. It is an anti-romance book. While many readers read fiction to escape reality, Rejection forces the reader to confront the very real and often excruciating experience of being denied what one desires.
Yet rejection doesn't have to be painful. In fact, rejection is often very funny, at least to the people that aren't going through it. And it’s even possible that some of those that are rejected find a perverse pleasure in their outcast status: in one story a friend of a perma-rejected sad sack tells him that “It’s easy to feel sorry for yourself when you keep redefining rejection. You refuse pity but crave it so much that you won’t admit how strongly you invite it.”
Indeed, there is range to the art of rejection, and not just the way in which people can feel about being rejected. Tulathimutte shows his skill in inhabiting the lives of imagined others via the sheer amount of personalities he presents, as the protagonists of the first three stories are a straight man, a straight woman, and a gay man, respectively. And even though the first three stories are written in the third person, Tulathimutte’s narrative voice makes them feel as though they are told in the first person, with an omniscient narrator who is perfectly able to mirror the protagonists’ affects, like a best buddy that always emphasizes with a friend that loves to vent. And there sure is a lot of venting in this book, sometimes to close friends, sometimes to the salacious group chats that serve as gossip hubs in our detached digital age, and sometimes in a long email dump that serves as an easy exposition of the preceding series of unfortunate events.
So what exactly does it mean to be rejected? Most stories in this book focus on romantic rejection; on unrequited love. Indeed, one character muses that “Love is not an accomplishment, yet to lack it still somehow feels like failure.” We live in a supposed meritocracy, where we have, in theory, the freedom to do anything: to choose what career path to go down, what we want to consume both in terms of food and entertainment, and where we want to live, at least if we have the money for it. But the old adage is true: money can’t buy love. One of the stories, titled “Our Dope Future,” is a parody of a “hustle bro” that seeks to buy his way into getting a woman to want to be his girlfriend, only to be ultimately spurned by the woman and accused of being controlling by online commentators. Indeed, such stories reveal the rising ennui of our age, where humans are siloed into homogenized communities, and where all actions are regulated through “discourse” on social media. Even as young adults now talk endlessly online about sex, dating, and relationships and neologisms like “situationship” and “soft-launching” are all part of the young love-seeker’s lexicon, Millennials and Zoomers are more likely to be single than ever before. All the rejection stories prominently feature the rhizome of the virtual space, where tales of woe are dissected before a faceless audience of usernames passing judgment on the stories of other faceless usernames. As one character observes, “It’s a mistake to believe social media is all about hearts and thumbs, flames and eggplants. If everyone were only trying to be liked then it’d be kinder, and way more boring. But discourse is loneliness disguised as war.”
But while relationship-related woes make up the bulk of Rejection, one story, “Main Character,” stands out in stark contrast. This story is about both rejection of an identity and rejection based on identity. Tulathimutte again writes with his gaze towards our cultural zeitgeist, where “identity politics” has become a politically-charged and polemical term. In “Main Character,” the main character, Bee, has a gender-identity crisis as a child. She doesn’t particularly feel like being a girl, whatever that may entail, so in a hilarious stroke of kid-logic genius, she decides to “sell” her gender to a boy named Sean for just twenty-two dollars, promising him that he’d be able to do whatever girls did, like being able to use the girls’ bathroom. Bee later rejects the gender binary altogether, including the label of “nonbinary,” instead going by the gender of “epicene.”
Besides rejecting gender labels, Bee also tries to escape the confines of racial stereotyping. Bee had trouble fitting in as a Thai American in an Irish-Catholic enclave in Massachusetts and pondered about what “being Thai” even means. This is an old trope, of course, as many generations of immigrants to America, including the Irish Americans in Bee’s town, had to ask themselves the same questions about identity. Bee describes other Asian Americans as fitting into three standard categories: those that assimilate into the majority mainstream culture, those that join a counterculture, and those that adopt a “sort of cosplay of one’s own heritage, expressed in the consumption of its exports, ramen and roti, boba and bhangra, mochi and manga.”
Bee attempts to reject this triptych by trying to be above it all, which in the 90s meant being goth, complete with an all-black wardrobe, although she notes that “It is the plight of the Asian goth to be denied the act of dyeing one’s hair black, it being black already.” Indeed, even in this act of trying to reject labels, Bee finds that labels have a way of catching up to you. Perhaps the best way to beat the identity politics game is to simply just not care at all. After all, you can’t get rejected if you never sign up in the first place.
Sheluyang Peng is a writer living in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.
