Rejection
Tony Tulathimutte
I’m always pleased when I pick up a book and discover it’s completely different to the one I read before it. On this occasion, it was a particular relief – I loved Open, Heaven so much I’m sure if I’d read another novel straight after it that tried to do anything similar I would have found it lacking.
Thankfully, Rejection couldn’t have been more different. It’s brash, ostentatiously smart and dark. Each of its characters has been rejected and each deals with it in a different—yet equally unattractive—way. Often, the situations they end up in are absurd. The result is appallingly funny.
As unlikeable as these characters may be, they are not mere figures of fun. Their problems highlight much about modern-day society and their predicaments are familiar ones. The book is particularly good at capturing the hyper-awareness of life today. One character laments that “his sadness, he knows, is a symptom of his entitlement, so he is not even entitled to his sadness”. Time and again, this self-consciousness leads to paralysis; one character “apologizes and stares at his stupid face in the sideview mirror, getting sucked into an emotional gravity well where he pities Julian for dating such a loser, and resents Julian for pitying him, and pities himself for being pitied, all of which cancels out into silence”. These descriptions, which are both atrocious and all too recognisable, made me laugh aloud.
As a whole, the book sits somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories. Each chapter introduces a new character who is loosely connected to at least one who has come before, but the chapters could stand alone as individual narratives. The detachment feels apt, given the book’s theme.
It was when I got to the end that my appreciation of this book really deepened. The two final sections are a collection of “sixteen metaphors” and, in keeping with the theme, a fictional rejection letter, which critiques the novel and then, in a final spiral, the rejection letter itself as “the most bizarre and pointless flourish of all”. Bizarre and pointless, yes, but thoroughly entertaining.
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