Photo-Illustration: Vulture
It would be easy to call Rejection an “incel novel” — especially because it starts with a man who’s denied sex by nearly every woman he pursues. That label would tell you how angry these characters are, how vain their efforts, how stunted their worldviews. It summons their yearning and guarantees their failure. But the seven interlocked stories in this book, the second by Tony Tulathimutte, go deeper and fouler than inceldom. In Rejection, sexual failure is only the fruiting body; self-hatred, nihilism, and shame are the mycelium that makes the fungus grow.
We see this in the opening story, “The Feminist,” about a self-defined nice guy and ally who’s stuck “dragging his virginity like a body bag”…
