Even Losers Get Lucky Sometimes. Not in This Book.

REJECTION, by Tony Tulathimutte

If Tony Tulathimutte’s new book, a collection of linked stories titled “Rejection,” were a futuristic pop-up book, up would jump unflattering sex pics, medicine for cauliflower acne, unreturned texts, hateful pet birds, the Stanford alumni magazine, terrible food, the odors of crotches and armpits, semi-satirical Judith Butler Halloween costumes and holograms of “friends” who are either poseurs or users or toxic grievance collectors.

This book is so cold and lonely you could hang meat in it. “Rejection” is not an ironic title. Elizabeth Hardwick wrote that poverty, in the form of multiple occupancy, has “a marigold odor.” Does abjection have a smell? If so, add it to the list above.

Tulathimutte’s characters are shoe gazers. They’re snails that have been emotionally salted. His subject is not fashionable ennui. He is writing about alienation and skin starvation, a longing for the nonexistent touches of friends and the embraces of lovers.

These young men and women are mostly short and unattractive; they have large pores and clerkly physiques and may be balding. They are losers in the great American popularity contest. They’ve been cut from the herd. Neither the sheep nor the goats want them.

No one here gets out alive — if soul murder counts.

I read “Rejection” during a week when I felt down, and it almost stubbed me out, like a cigarette. If it were an Instagram friend, I would have unfollowed it. But Tulathimutte is such an acutely observant writer that I was entranced by his book despite its narrowness and emotional barbarity.

One of Tulathimutte’s primal topics is online culture and its diseased repercussions, and he writes about these things in the way Anthony Bourdain wrote about restaurants, Hunter S. Thompson wrote about motorcycle gangs and Molly Ivins wrote about water-headed Texas politicians. He’s alert, in other words; he’s tanked up, bleakly funny and always stropping his knife.