Book review: Tony Tulathimutte's 'Rejection' is raw, scary and marvellous
'Rejection' is the most ambitious book I've read in years, and it delivers
Some books ask a lot of the reader and give little back. Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection is not one of them.
Published in 2024, Rejection is billed as a collection of seven interlinked stories, though that description undersells how tightly they’re stitched together. Characters drift in and out of each other’s chapters, sometimes as the central figure, sometimes as a footnote in someone else’s disaster. Piecing those connections together was one of the great pleasures of reading it.
The book opens with “The Feminist”, and it’s the story I keep coming back to. It follows a self-described ally who curdles, chapter by chapter, into something far darker when the women he claims to respect don’t reward him with the intimacy he thinks he’s owed. It’s raw. It’s thought-provoking. And frankly, it’s scary, not because it’s outlandish, but because it isn’t.
That’s the trick of the whole book. Tulathimutte writes about the internet-poisoned, terminally online corners of modern loneliness with a satirist’s precision and a novelist’s patience. Nobody in “Rejection” is spared. Every character is convinced they’re the reasonable one, the wronged one, the exception, and the book lets them hang themselves with their own logic.
It would be easy for a premise like this to collapse into cynicism or, worse, cruelty. It doesn’t. There’s real craft holding it together: the structural game of recurring characters, the way each story finds its own form (one arrives as a string of Reddit posts, another as an increasingly unhinged text thread), and a command of voice that shifts completely from story to story without ever losing its grip on the reader.
This is ambitious writing, and it’s rare to see a book swing this hard and still land every punch. Rejection doesn’t just have a clever structure or a topical subject. It has something to say about how people fail each other, and how they fail themselves first, and it says it without flinching.
If you’ve been looking for a book that’s smart without being smug, dark without being nihilistic, and genuinely hard to put down, this is it.