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When I started reading Tony Tulathimutte’s “Ahegao” late last year, I didn’t expect to finish it in utter horror. I rarely laugh or cry out loud when reading fiction these days, my aging adult heart immune to the physical convulsions literature could induce when I was a teenager. But there I was, howling as if I were at a wrestling match rather than reading literary fiction in The Paris Review. I may not have anticipated the physical reactions, but I knew he was the real deal. I had admired and enjoyed his 2016 debut novel, Private Citizens, a funny and accurate satire about post-college millennials in mid-2000s San Francisco that was widely praised, including by the likes of Jonathan Franzen. Reading Private Citizens, I was struck by Tulathimutte's unusual and deft skill at combining masterful wit with a specific, precise, and self-conscious kind of humor that at times left me wriggling.
If that quality was present in his debut, it is evident in his long-awaited follow-up, Rejection, a novel told in seven stories including “Ahegao” about Kant, a “virgin Asian porn-addict in his mid-30s” who lacks sex appeal and luck but has a penchant for creative sadism. The stories are linked thematically and sometimes through recurring characters. Rejection was published on
September 17 and was the subject of glowing reviews from Jia Tolentino in The New Yorker and Dwight Garner in The New York Times, who confessed to being enthralled despite calling it “emotionally depraved.”
I wish I could say that five years later our pain had melted away, that time had healed. I wish I could tell you that we never gossiped, complained, or put each other down again. I wish I could say that nothing we ever did made the other angry anymore. Most of all, I wish I could tell you that five years later Ruby graduated from college and Hart, a rookie actor, was starring in his senior high school play. What I can tell you, all I can tell you, is that we were there.
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