When I began to read the author Tony Tulathimutte’s story “ Ahegao ” late last year, I did not expect to finish it in disbelieving horror. I rarely laugh or cry aloud at a work of fiction nowadays, my wizened adult heart immune to the sort of physical convulsions literature could cause when I was an adolescent. Yet there I was, howling like I was at a wrestling match instead of reading literary fiction in The Paris Review .
I may not have anticipated the physical reflexes, but I already knew he was the real deal. I had admired and enjoyed his 2016 debut novel Private Citizens , a funny and precise satire about post collegiate millennials in the mid-2000s in San Francisco which was widely lauded, including by the likes of Jonathan Franzen. It had struck me while reading Private Citizens that Tulathimutte has the unusual and dextrous skill of combining virtuoso intelligence with a kind of humour so specific, accurate and self-conscious that it sometimes made me physically squirm.
If this quality was present in his debut, it overwhelms in Rejection , his much anticipated follow-up. This is a novel told through seven stories – “Ahegao” among them – about Kant, a “pornsick Asian virgin in his 30s” whose lack of sexual charisma and luck is complemented by a taste for inventive sexual sadism. The stories are linked thematically and sometimes through recurring characters.
Rejection was published in September, and was the subject of ecstatic reviews by Jia Tolentino .