Tony Tulathimutte is adept at conjuring unease through fiction. His first novel, 2016’s Private Citizens, plumbed the lives and anxieties of four college graduates in the mid-2000s, a searing effort that Kirkus deemed “witty, unsparing, and unsettlingly precise.” In his second book, Rejection (Morrow/HarperCollins, Sept. 17), Tulathimutte further ups the ante, taking his readers through meticulously detailed rabbit holes of discomfort in seven stories all connected by the titular experience. The result, according to Kirkus’ starred review, is “a hilariously brazen and existentially unsettling portrait of modern life, love, and identity.” Tulathimutte, 40, spoke to Kirkus via Zoom from his home in Brooklyn; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
What inspired rejection as the theme for this book? Is there a real-life rejection behind the decision?
Not really one in particular, more like a lot of them. I wrote this book for the reason that a lot of writers write their books, which is that I wanted to read a book about rejection and I couldn’t find one…that used it as its organizing theme and really entered it in the narrative, instead of just employing it as a plot device.
How do you categorize the book? Do you think of it as a novel in stories, as a collection of interlinked stories, or as something else entirely?
It’s funny, right? Because on the cover of the book, it says fiction, instead of stories or a novel, and I’ve never seen a book do that before. I was OK with it, because I sort of have a hard time categorizing it myself.
So the idea to call it fiction on the cover wasn’t your idea?
No, it wasn’t my idea, and it’s because I toggle between the two [a collection of stories and a novel]. If I wanted to properly set people’s reading expectations, I would probably say stories, but I always think of everything that I work on with a novel-writing attitude, which is that the whole thing is interlinked and interdependent. I don’t think of any of the stories as existing in isolation, and they are incomplete, in a way, without the context of the others.
Were there other books that inspired you when you were creating that structure?
Structurally, no. It’s kind of an odd book. It was even odder when I was working on it—I had in mind a book of mixed fiction and nonfiction, and there’s not even a name for that. I guess you could call it hybrid genre, or multigenre, but that’s sort of horribly inelegant. I was thinking of it as being a 50-50 split between fiction and et cetera, and the et ceteraconsisted of a long essay and a lot of really weird things like a glossary and logical propositions and stuff like that. But, frankly, the fiction part just kept on getting much longer, until it would be something more like an 80-20 split, and that just felt awkward to me. I think you can see, in the end result, the aftereffects of that nonfiction turn, originally, because the book does sort of strain against the boundaries of fiction in its last three pieces. A lot of that material was adapted from the nonfiction material I had before.
The idea of identity and who has the right to do or say what recurs throughout the book, like the narrator of “The Feminist” repeatedly referring to his “QPOC agender friend.” It’s really uncomfortable, but it’s also very thought-provoking.
I think that identity heavily mediates all human relationships, and this is especially the case when you get to the theater of romance. One’s sexual orientation often has to pass through these filters of gender codes, and I wanted to get at that from both extremes, from a character like Craig in “The Feminist,” who can really only see things through the lens of identity, to Bee in “Main Character,” who wants to subvert or ultimately annihilate that idea. In both cases, it’s arguably inescapable for them; Bee, I think, finds a sort of solution in total isolation and total technological mediation, but that’s not a solution that’s tenable for most people.
Private Citizens was dubbed “the first great millennial novel” by New York magazine. How do you feel about that label?
I actually wrote an essay about this for the New York Times. I think it’s definitely flattering, but it’s deployed as a kind of superlative when, really, it’s just a descriptor of a genre, which is usually younger people in their teens or 20s, often living in a city or hitting the road and doing things that are considered of a piece with the zeitgeist. So you have books like Douglas Coupland’s Generation X, which ended up naming not just one but two generations, and before that, books like On the Road, which got the same label, but I find it funny that, even though my book fits this bill, I don’t really believe that there is such a thing as a single book that can encompass the experiences of an entire generation. It can be deceiving, the way that fiction works on its reader to feel relatable, even if the characters are very different from you and their experiences are very different than yours.
The subject matter of your book is often heavy, but it also has a lot of humor, especially that mock letter rejecting the book at the end. Was that piece fun to write? Or was it also a little painful?
The answer always is “Both.” The rejection letter was fun because I got to make my best effort at presenting a version of how all the stories tied together. But because I don’t like to give up the game and spoon-feed the reader what I’m trying to do, it was important to me [that the letter writer’s critiques of the book] had to be wrong—but not dumb. I really tried to lean into what the letter itself called “adversarial autofiction,” where if you take a certain set of premises, which are different than mine, and use that to interpret the book, you end up with a much different one than I wrote. I thought that that really aligned well with the overall perversity of the book. I didn’t want to end on some kind of triumphalist or redemptive note—I wanted to do the exact opposite.
What can you tell us about your next project?
I don’t know much about it yet. I pretty much started from scratch about two months ago. I had a novel in the works before that, which I am poaching some material from, but all I know right now is that it’s fiction. Time has shown that my first idea about what a project is usually does not sustain itself. It tends to buckle under its own weight at some point….I find that progressing as a writer really has a lot to do with stripping away successive layers of denial about what kind of writer you are or what a project is meant to be.
Nina Palattella is the editorial assistant.