The characters in Tony Tulathimutte’s novel in stories, Rejection (Morrow, Sept.), turn increasingly inward after failing at romance and their careers.
How did this book come about?
I was lying face down in bed in Iowa City in 2011 and thinking I’m going to write a book called Rejection. I’d been looking for books to read about rejection and I couldn’t find any that weren’t self-help. There are rejection plots in literature, but they usually are not the sole emphasis of the book. I thought, what if there was a whole book about rejection, unambiguously?
The first three stories are about romantic rejection, but toward the end the book, professional rejection also comes into play.
I wanted it to progress through different types of rejection. I think of the first three stories as a trilogy. They are all about romantic rejection but the first story, “The Feminist,” is about a lifelong pattern of rejection, where you see this guy become a different person after suffering one rejection after another. Then “Pics” focuses on a single rejection that derails a person’s life, and “Ahegao” is about the kind of person who is so afraid of rejection that they can’t accept acceptance.
Did you anticipate the metafictional turn Rejection takes in the second half?
No, and I’m not even a huge fan of metafiction. There’s always a risk that the reader will come away feeling like they’ve been messed with. But often I find I’ve convinced myself that I don’t like something and then that conviction ends up hardening into me going and doing it anyway. That is just one of many unfortunate things about me, I guess.
Could you talk about the evolution of “Main Character,” a story within a story that’s framed as an investigation by a group of internet users into an online hoax?
I had to rewrite it four times because I kept getting the form wrong. What started off as a story written in the form of Tinder DMs became a blog post, which became a forum discussion on a message board, and then finally it took the form that it took.
Were there any books you used as guides?
David Foster Wallace’s story “The Depressed Person” is a pretty clear antecedent to at least one of the stories. Easter Parade by Richard Yates was useful because it’s written overwhelmingly in summary, which is something that the first three stories do. Books about people being alone and miserable, generally, were helpful.
Things start out bad but hopeful, and then they get less and less hopeful.
I wanted to do the opposite of an arc you expect by default, that involves increasing redemption or where you get to the truth of the character where you can find a strange identification with them. None of that. No glimmer of hope. Wouldn’t feel honest for a project like this.
