The key social act in today’s neoliberal culture is selling yourself, in private as much as professional life. However, to do so successfully someone must want to buy what you are selling, which they often don’t. Rejection, or the spectre of it, is thus a paradigmatic experience of our era. The ruthless economy of contemporary romance – the world of dating apps rather than job applications – is a case in point. It operates against the backdrop of a broader crisis in intimate relationships, as people seek each other out to fulfil basic desires for love, companionship, sex and economic stability, but increasingly lack the normative social structures which once prescribed what the fulfilment of those desires should look like. The expansion of romantic choice – often more illusory than real, as in so many other domains of life under neoliberalism – has gone hand in hand with increasing precarity: everyone must fend for themselves. In this unsteady terrain, pathologies flourish.

Rejection, the new short story collection by the American writer Tony Tulathimutte, is an unsparing diagnostic of this libidinal moment. Tulathimutte’s first book, Private Citizens (2016), was an acerbic portrait of Silicon Valley and its satellite economy of startups and non-profits on the eve of the social media boom. Drawing on Tulathimutte’s experiences as a student in California at that time, the novel centred on the misadventures of a group of Stanford graduates. It was an accomplished performance, crackling with energy, though it bore the unmistakeable stamp of the MFA – a prose style a little too enamoured with its own deadpan intelligence. Rejection overcomes this weakness. The satire is more stripped-down, the prose less self-regarding, the characterization more exact and controlled. We are back in the Bay Area: the characters are entwined to some degree with Silicon Valley, working as software engineers, video-game designers, or startup entrepreneurs; some are graduates of Stanford. Yet this is both a more penetrating book and a darker one.

The protagonists are all losers, in romance and in social life. They feel spurned, and thereby alienate themselves in turn, often occupying a lonely space between self-loathing and self-righteousness. Rejection’s opening story, ‘The Feminist’, a viral hit when first published by n+1 in 2019, follows the downward trajectory of a self-styled feminist and nice guy who cannot understand, given these credentials, why he has no success with women. Unnamed, he is revealed to be called Craig in a subsequent story; the protagonists in Rejection are connected, the reject of one story reappearing in a cameo role in another, sometimes rejecting another reject, providing shifting perspectives on events. Craig’s feminism, it becomes clear, is a mask disguising his contempt for women, including from himself. Increasingly embittered by his romantic failures, he develops psychosexual symptoms – both impotence and incontinence. He becomes a moderator on anti-feminist and men’s rights forums, one of them called ‘NSOM (Narrow Shoulders / Open Minds)’ – an example of Tulathimutte’s biting humour. Men like him, Craig comes to believe, are the real victims of modern society and its progressive nostrums. The end of the story finds Craig donning a ski mask and removing a backpack from his shoulders at a local restaurant full of young families, poised, it would seem, to commit a mass shooting.

Craig reappears briefly in the next story as a one-time suitor of Alison. ‘Pics’ is about Alison’s fixation on a male friend; they once slept together but he did not want to pursue a relationship. Wounded by the snub, Alison offloads on a group chat she shares with former colleagues, so-called friends whom she does not in fact know very well. The cringe-inducing formality of her contributions to the chat is out of kilter with the idiom of the group, which is full of slangy abbreviations and emojis. After conflict breaks out – Alison’s pet raven bites the child of one of her friends – one member accuses her obtuse texting style of being a pose. ‘See *this* is why we started the other group chat’, the friend later announces with haunting callousness, as Alison’s messages become increasingly spiteful and unbalanced. Eventually, everyone abandons Alison and leaves the group. The combination of humour and cruelty is a hallmark of Rejection, as of the digitally mediated contemporary world it represents, where so much communication is textual, public and hyper-self-conscious. Tulathimutte is finely attuned to the language and mores of digital communication, which are rarely reproduced so directly in literature.

Some of Tulathimutte’s casualties of rejection are grotesque, and primarily elicit revulsion, while others are self-destructive and arouse our pity. Typically, they oscillate between the two. Notwithstanding his monstrous finale, Craig’s story does inspire some qualified sympathy. He is unable to sell himself as the romantic marketplace demands because he is trying too hard. His online dating profile reads as unintentional pastiche: ‘He/him/his (or whatever pronouns you are most comfortable with). Unshakably serious about consent. Abortion’s #1 fan . . . I can usually be found haunting the bookstores and bakeshops of our fair burgh, when I’m not dismantling the imperialist male supremacist hetero patriarchy.’ Alison also ends up behaving objectionably: being racist to an Asian friend in the group chat and repeatedly invoking the trope of the hyper-sexualized Asian woman coupling with a white man (she is bitterly envious of her crush’s new fiancé). But her low self-esteem and way of alienating herself make her pitiable too.

‘Aheago, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression’ provokes a similar mixture of responses. The story centres on a Thai-American named Kant, a video-game designer who is emotionally stunted and sexually repressed, remaining in the closet until his 30s. Yet even after he miraculously finds a loving boyfriend, Kant does not achieve sexual fulfilment. A lifelong pornography addiction, internalized racism and compulsive gaming have left him obsessed with an inverted fantasy of himself as a Thai supervillain who sexually humiliates a straight white man at a gym. Kant sabotages his relationship and attempts to hire a sex worker to film an approximation of this fantasy. Much of the story consists of a long email giving detailed instructions to the sex worker, a pornographic wish-fulfilment script that would make de Sade proud (it includes a section in which the sex worker is shrunk down to 18 inches and kept in a jar of Kant’s semen as a pet). The story ends with another digital faux pas, one that proves catastrophic. A sleep-deprived Kant accidentally sends the email to the list of friends and family he had compiled to announce his coming out at the beginning of the story. The audience for his liberation becomes witnesses to his humiliation.

The balance shifts decisively towards disgust in ‘Our Dope Future’. The story is told from the point of view of an unnamed tech bro who runs a variety of startup scams, including a company that sells a meal-replacement shake called DöpeSauce. The story takes the form of a post analogous to those found on the AITA (short for ‘AmItheAsshole’) subreddit. ‘Waddap!’, it begins:

I (37M) am a serial entrepreneur, inventor and futurist who’s been his own boss since age 18. I am homeschooled, self-made, visited 29 countries and counting, never touch alcohol but a big caffeine junkie, believer in a Stoic outlook to life, dreams big, never wastes time, always has his mind on the next move, and totes family-oriented.

The post grows increasingly sinister: ‘One thing about me is I never know when to quit, which is usually good, and sometimes not, as you’ll see.’ It tells the story of his relationship with Alison (‘32F’), who is vulnerably depressed after the misadventures recounted in her own story. They began seeing each other after he bombarded her with messages on a dating app. He then locked her in his apartment and confiscated her phone. In the post, he details a eugenic fantasy of creating an aristocratic bloodline with Alison. Their ‘dozen’ kids will themselves have ‘dozens of kids of their own’; he speculates that in nine generations his offspring will number five billion, while he will live to 200 thanks to daily blood transfusions and a strict dietary regime that includes DöpeSauce’s ‘Chili Dog Autojuvenation Blend’. The parallels with the Silicon Valley elite speak for themselves (it was recently revealed that Elon Musk has a compound in Texas for housing 11 of his children).

‘Main Character’ is a more ambiguous dispatch from the darker corners of the Internet. Presented as an online explainer of an Internet hoax – ‘an introductory guide to Botgate’ – it details how a gender-fluid Thai-American named Bee, sibling of Kant, created thousands of sockpuppet accounts and bots to manufacture online controversies. The guide includes a kind of autobiographical manifesto where Bee confesses their hatred for ‘identity’, which the scheme – flooding the Internet with fake accounts – was designed to undermine, generating an anarchic culture of rampant grievance.

Rejection concludes with ‘sixteen metaphors’, vignettes on the theme of rejection (for example: ‘You’re an apple, and nothing’s wrong with you’, yet ‘no grocery shopper will touch you, and by the time you’re finally noticed, you’re as rotten as you always knew you were’), followed by a long rejection email from a publisher (‘Re: Rejection’), which gives a brutal assessment of the book we have just read. The publisher accuses Tulathimutte of indulging in the kind of preening virtue-signalling satirized in ‘The Feminist’, and a form of disavowed narcissism. Rejection is ‘an attempt at misdirection, as you smuggle your own hang-ups’ into the characters, some of whom, the publisher notes, Tulathimutte shares biographical coordinates with. In a final metafictional twist, the email concludes by analysing itself: ‘a ventriloquist act where you voice your misgivings about the book through a fictional jury of scowling publishers. This to us, for obvious reasons, seemed the most bizarre and pointless flourish of all’. It seems that even hyper-self-awareness is no defence against rejection: ‘the real point, we think, is to foreclose scrutiny, to get ahead of rejection . . . we reject you (literally) all the harder’.

The parting emphasis on the author himself is instructive. Tulathimutte – born in 1983 and raised in Massachusetts – is the son of Thai immigrants, and Thailand is a frequent reference point throughout the collection. After receiving pushback online about his fantasy of populating the earth with Alison, the protagonist of ‘Our Dope Future’ leaves the country as part of a seasteading venture, which fails miserably. He ends up malnourished in Thailand, where he is arrested for breaching territorial waters and accused of human trafficking. The country has a particularly strong presence in the American racist psychosexual consciousness, associated with sex tourism and the Orientalized figure of the kathoey, or ‘ladyboy’, while Asian people more broadly are often figured as submissive conduits for forbidden sexual desires. Thailand also exerts another, more overtly political attraction. One fantasy of the contemporary American right envisages an authoritarian state that would firmly re-establish heterosexual and patriarchal norms. Thailand at various points in its modern history could represent a model for the desires of the Trump movement and its Silicon Valley allies – conservative, anti-communist and authoritarian, with a monarch-like figure presiding over a sex work economy that exploits mostly poor women, all predicated on male dominance.

Rejection is a cold and ugly book, compulsively entertaining yet unremittingly bleak. The reading experience it offers can feel akin to doomscrolling on the website formerly known as Twitter or binging Reddit posts. Tulathimutte’s vision of California is luridly hellish, a Bosch painting as a deep-fried meme – a place where the apocalypse has already occurred, with the rest of the world fast catching up. In this dystopia there is no growth, no self-understanding, only loneliness and misery spiralling into delusion and hate. Yet as grotesque as it is, and for all its postmodern flourishes, Rejection is a lucid satire that feels naturalistic: a portrayal of those swallowed up by the meta-textual exercise that is life as mediated by the Internet.

Read on: Nick Burns & Ross Douthat, ‘Condition of America’, NLR 152.