When I began reading author Tony Tulathimutte’s novel Ahegao late last year, I had no idea I would finish it with a tale of unrelenting horror. Nowadays, I rarely laugh or cry during works of fiction, my adult heart immune to the kind of physical cramps that literature could cause in my teens. Yet there I was, screaming like I was at a wrestling match rather than reading literary fiction in The Paris Review.
I may not have anticipated his physical reaction, but I already knew he was the real deal. I admired and loved his 2016 debut, Private Citizen, a funny and accurate satirical novel about post-millennials at the University of San Francisco in the mid-2000s, inspired by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, which was widely praised. While reading “The Ordinary Citizen,” I was struck by the unusual dexterity with which Turadimit combined a great intellect with a humor that was so specific, precise and self-aware that it sometimes made me physically uncomfortable.
If this quality was evident in his debut, it seems overwhelming in his much-anticipated follow-up, Denial. It is a novel that, through seven stories (including “Ahegao”), tells the story of Kant, an “Asian virgin in her thirties” who lacks sexual charm and luck but loves creative sex. The stories are thematically linked, sometimes through recurring characters. “Rejected” will be released on September 17, and was enthusiastically reviewed by The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino and The New York Times critic Dwight Garner, who admitted to being captivated, despite the “emotional collapse” of the material.
I met Tony last year through a mutual friend at a party I was nervous to attend. I was still in the process of moving to New York, unsure of how to define myself as a writer and a person, and comparing myself to the more accomplished people around me. For whatever reason, this particular gathering filled me with defensive anxiety until Tony, whom I had never met before, started saying some of the most surprising, most astonishing things I had ever heard anyone say in real life, the most honest, most awkward (and unprintable) things.
I liked him immediately, for reasons not unrelated to the reason I enjoy his writing, the pleasant sensation of constantly asking myself in his company, “Can people say things like that?” I liked him even more when I discovered we both have a passion for karaoke, and even more when he hired a professional magician named Justin Sytch to surprise us at his birthday party. (Justin appeared again at Tony’s “Rejection” press conference in the East Village last month.)
I met Tony recently at Rialto Grande, a Brooklyn bar between two of our blocks, where we drank a lot of happy hour cosmopolitan beers, and I wanted to ask him how he stood out among so many people who (in my opinion) succeed where he all fail to write in a contemporary way that feels authentic and concrete without falling into reference-filled prose about the internet, which I find not only inelegant but essentially unreadable, nothing more than a series of flash cards with popular terms that pop into the brain for a while and then disappear forever. I asked him about this and whether he had to develop strategies to keep references from becoming outdated or unnecessary.
“To a certain extent, you’ll get people like Mindy Kaling of the Democratic National Committee saying about Nancy Pelosi, ‘She’s a child before she’s a child, she’s the mother of dragons.’ You’ll always get some kind of practice. Nobody is more likely to make that mistake than a literary fiction writer. You can go to any book club out there, people are so hungry for humor that you can just say, “Twitter,” and people will laugh.
So, how to avoid this flattering behavior?
“If you want to write about how things are different now than they were before, you have to talk about how the structure of things is different. But underneath that structure, everything that is said is exactly the same as before. The theme of rejection is really evergreen. Customs and habits are different. Hiding someone or not reading someone is new, but rejecting someone by ignoring them or not acknowledging them happens all the time, the only difference is what platform it happens on.
What surprised and horrified me most about “Rejection” was that it forced me to grapple with those obnoxious male losers in a way that was both ironic and true and made me unable to stop seeing them as weak human beings. In the story “The Feminist,” a man insists on promoting his alliances as long as women have sex with him, which gradually makes him hate them.
While reading this book, I was fascinated by the portrayal of a feminist and an alienation that turned into hatred: “He pulled his virginity away like a body bag in his twenties, having watched a certain number of previous dom-oriented porn, this may be due to inherent sexism, but he’s read that porn is a safe, healthy space to explore kinks, that sex is neither a choice nor shameful, especially if the studios he works with follow good labor and care practices, and although he doesn’t mention that he would seek out actresses who look like him, he believes it’s acceptable to separate fantasy from reality as long as he takes it seriously.”
But I’m also shocked and embarrassed to read female characters who mock and belittle loneliness, when it should be a sympathetic issue for men. That was more or less my knee-jerk reaction to these ideas recently — that male privilege is so absolute that it somehow excludes all the universal problems of being human. I mentioned this to Tony. “People saw an opportunity to participate in the murder, to put this person in his place and exercise their political good faith,” Turatimut said. “But tying political views and political actions to influence is always a bad idea.”
There’s something unique about Daniel’s tone, which blends absurdity and vulgarity with a fearless sarcasm at deadly seriousness. Some people find this book frustrating or laborious to read. I find it thrilling. How often have we been able to honestly confront the more abhorrent failures of our time and laugh or gasp with genuine surprise while doing so? The solipsistic echo chamber that the characters in “Rejection” inhabit can be soul-crushing, but the presence of a serious but funny writer like Tony Turatimut is a great balm.
