Emily May's Reviews > Rejection

Star ratings are an inadequate way of expressing my feelings for this book. It is perhaps best summed up in a single word: WOAH.

The first note I made while reading this was literally "yeah, wow, this is so good" which is funny and also a bit embarrassing next to the eloquence of Tulathimutte.

Rejection is a collection of depressing, intimate portraits largely about lonely, alienated people who just cannot get it right. The characters in the first three stories are desperate for love and connection-- emphasis on the "desperate" --but they keep being met with rejection. These people are cringe, pathetic, try-hard… and, even in their worst moments, somehow sympathetic. We meet people who get destroyed by rejection, allowing being a reject to become their entire personhood.

I feel for characters like this, I really do. Like, in a slightly different life I feel my very socially clueless self could have easily ended up one of them. They are like Sally Rooney characters x1000, super annoying and totally sabotaging their own happiness because they can't get out of their heads, yet there is something compelling about them.

As you move through the stories, it becomes clear they are all interlinked by more than just the theme of rejection. And it also becomes clear that the author is spinning an overarching metanarrative, one that somehow feels both serious and satirical at the same time.

There was a point, I will admit it, when I thought maybe this book was just a bit too mired in pretentious navel-gazing narcissism for me (probably right around the point I was shamed into googling some of the vocab) and I was thinking maybe four stars because, come on, Mr Tulathimutte, you're good, but it's all a bit cringe, a bit desperate and try-hard, isn't it?

And then I read the last story and I had to laugh at myself. Well played, sir. Well played.