Whatevership

Awoman in a field​ cradling a baby and whispering: ‘This is what they want to take from you.’ A man explaining that bathing in cold water reduced his age by three years. An animated frog. A group of Mormon mothers performing a synchronised dance routine, then squabbling about their infidelities in a series of reels. Shitposts. Earnest sadposts. Thirst traps. A bulging man who eats raw organ meat and calls himself the Liver King. A woman who whispers to you that you are a Mesopotamian artefact she is restoring. And I haven’t even mentioned the porn.

Where is the corresponding fiction? Most of the recent works cited as examples of ‘internet novels’, such as Lauren Oyler’s Fake Accounts and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking about This, depict nice liberals online or nice liberals gawking at mean conservatives online; they succeed in some ways, but fail to take full advantage of the internet’s grotesquerie. Who is writing Liver King fiction?

One possible answer is Tony Tulathimutte, whose new collection of interlinked stories, Rejection, is pleasingly abject. Its misfits are far from being nice liberals. Craig, the protagonist of ‘The Feminist’, is an incel who shoots up a restaurant; in ‘Pics’, Alison, a lonely millennial woman, obsessively scans the social media accounts of a man she once slept with, then confronts him on the dancefloor at his wedding. Many of Tulathimutte’s characters are connoisseurs of niche porn – ‘masturbauteurs’, as a character in his novel, Private Citizens (2016), puts it. Kant, a reclusive gay man who features in the story ‘Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression’, ultimately rebuffs his well-adjusted boyfriend, preferring the ‘hyperspecific porn that has been his lifelong solace – the yaoi visual novels, the vore and mpreg, the 100 per cent runs of fan-translated Illusions Soft erogē torrented from Hongfire’. His tastes are so rarefied that his ‘furtive and constant masturbation’ comes to seem ‘oddly sacramental’.

Tulathimutte’s characters have no choice but to elevate masturbation to an art because no one else is willing to touch them. The book is a compendium of sexual humiliations, most of them thoroughly deserved. Craig, for instance, is an insufferable do-gooder who carries a ‘Read Women’ tote bag and tweets under the handle @listenandevolve. His studied feminism is a pose affected in expectation of a reward, preferably a sexual one, although he’s willing to settle for the moral high ground. He attributes his romantic failure to his narrow shoulders – he ‘can’t compete along conventional standards of height, weight, grip strength, whatever’ – but it’s obvious to everyone around him that his moist desperation and air of self-congratulation are to blame.

Some of the more unjust rejections in Tulathimutte’s work are the product of sexual racism. The masturbauteur in Private Citizens, a programmer called Will, complains that he is ‘pigeonholed as another Asian castrato’, and when Kant scrolls through the dating apps ‘every fiftieth or so profile states it rather bluntly, no fats femmes Asians, each applying to him in varying degrees.’ Sometimes these unjust rejections induce self-inflicted rejections, beginning an infinite regress of snubbings and shunnings. In the end, Kant is so used to ostracism that he can’t believe anyone could love him. He disgusts himself so much that his ‘very presence in his own fantasies ruins the fantasy’. He can endure only a few months of a relationship before rushing back to the internet.

In this book there is no alternative to shame and self-loathing, no possibility of redemption. Tulathimutte’s stories are impressive, but that doesn’t make them nice to read. Their unpleasantness is testament to the perversity of their subject matter, because the writing itself is enormous fun. Tulathimutte seizes on the indignities of contemporary language and wrests them into absurdities. Bee, Kant’s sister, says she’s ‘always believed that microaggressions warrant microapologies’. Alison describes herself as being in a ‘whatevership’ with the man whose wedding she disrupts. Descriptions are satisfyingly tart. Kant’s incompatible boyfriend is ‘tanned and centred, his chakras agape, comprehensively Californian’. Philip Roth and David Foster Wallace come to mind as antecedents, though Tulathimutte has their wit without their warmth. He writes like a child holding a microscope over the ground, peering down at an insect burning to death.

His characters prefer life online to life in the flesh because they want to escape the truncations of identity. Their goal is not to advertise the same old self, the one that can’t get laid, but to craft a new persona. Tulathimutte does this too: the last and least successful story in Rejection, a fake rejection letter from his publisher, is manically metatextual. ‘We regret that we must pass,’ the unnamed editors inform him, but the book’s publication is proof that the Tony Tulathimutte lambasted in the letter is only an avatar. It’s not enough to say that the real Tulathimutte doesn’t write autofiction: he writes anti-autofiction, fiction that basks in its falsity.

Of course, the internet can also facilitate a commitment to identity politics, in the form of glib and egotistical self-sorting. By the end of ‘The Feminist’, Craig is a regular participant in narrow-shoulder support groups such as NSOM (Narrow Shoulders/Open Minds). ‘At last, he’s found men willing to declare unapologetically narrow-shouldered feminist men are in truth the most oppressed subaltern group,’ doomed to endure ‘a marginalisation far worse than those based in race or gender, which were mere constructs, as opposed to the material fact of narrow shoulders’.

Bee, in the novella-length ‘Main Character’, chooses yet another route: she spends years orchestrating a campaign to destroy her selfhood. The story is partly a commentary on its own contents, in the manner of Pale Fire. ‘This is a comprehensive, regularly updated summary and analysis of the affair known as “Botgate”, the internet hoax/scandal associated with the person known as “Bee”,’ it begins. Bee’s biography, related in the second section of the story, may be fraudulent. Its author insists that the post we are reading is one of many different versions; the discrepancies between them obscure the truth of any one account. Whoever Bee is, her project is a flight from the indignity of identification. She is especially irked by her Thai heritage, at least in the version we read. Asian Americans have a choice of ‘three survival strategies’, she thinks. The first is assimilation, which involves accepting ‘second-class citizenship in exchange for a threadbare mantle of conditional whiteness’. The second is ‘appropriation, hermitcrabbing into some more popular minority culture’. The third and perhaps worst option is to embrace ‘cosplay of one’s own heritage, expressed in the consumption of its exports, ramen and roti, boba and bhangra, mochi and manga’ – to go in for a kind of ‘auto-orientalism’.

Bee will have none of it. At a meeting in her co-operative house at Stanford, she refuses to reveal her ethnicity, much to the confusion of her ostentatiously liberal peers. Gender is another nuisance she wants to dispense with. In high school, she tries to sell her gender for $22; at university, she infuriates her housemates by insisting: ‘I don’t really identify as anything.’ In chatrooms and forums, on anonymous message boards and blogs, ‘there emerged the option to be nobody in particular.’ If Bee can’t be free of personae altogether, she can at least be ‘sans corps – an entity of pure grammar, speech without the deception of flesh’. While her mother is dying of breast cancer, Bee sets out to commit ‘identity terrorism’ by creating a ‘clutch of alts’. ‘Since I couldn’t be no one, I would be everyone,’ she decides. Posts are formulaic enough that they prove easy to automate, and soon Bee and her army of bots are faking feuds and fuelling rumours. Fights, cancellations, banishments – Bee was behind most of the internet’s recent scandals, or so she claims.

Offline, however, she barely exists. She has no friends and is so inattentive to her appetite that she sometimes eats ‘nothing but yoghurt and deli meat for three days’. The few one-night stands she braved in college were unsatisfying. But Bee is comparatively lucky: the rest of Tulathimutte’s rejects can’t stop themselves from pursuing entanglements they come to regret. When Kant meets someone from a dating app, the man spends a long minute ‘uncapping, applying and recapping ChapStick’, and Kant’s efforts to act out his sadistic fantasies are limp and unconvincing: ‘Um, suck it. You fucking … pig.’ Actual sex is sordid and clumsy, unlike the choreography of porn. It’s no accident that Kant’s preferred genre, hentai, is animated. ‘What if he can only be attracted to his abstract fantasies, perhaps even to the very quality of their non-existence?’ he worries. What if he desires fiction because it is fiction? In Private Citizens, Will loves his collection of adult videos ‘for not insulting him by pretending it had anything to do with the reality of sex, or with him’.

Many of Tulathimutte’s characters have a fetish for falsity so acute that it extends beyond porn. ‘Reality took forever,’ Will thinks bitterly when he leaves his computer to meet a friend in a café. He can’t stand ‘the underwater way people walked and sent their voices wobbling through the air, how printed words lay inert like bugsplat, all manifesting the basic duh of the physical plane’. His would-be influencer girlfriend attempts to improve reality by transmuting it into content: she convinces him to help her start a live-streaming service that runs sixteen hours a day, then makes him get double eyelid surgery. The procedure goes wrong and he has to have both of his eyeballs removed.

Tulathimutte is engaging here in a kind of hysterical augmentation, a gothic enlargement of the sort that influencers undertake when they document (and dramatise) their days. He writes in the exaggerated register of the internet post: one story in Rejection even takes the form of a Reddit post, while ‘Main Character’ is a series of entries on a forum. In ‘Pics’, Alison belongs to a group chat that functions like a judgmental Greek chorus. (We can tell that Alison is a pariah because her contributions are fastidiously punctuated.)

These stories are everything that a good post should be – including a little too outrageous to be believable. Best of all is the sixteen-page domination fantasy that Kant types out for a call boy who makes videos on demand. It is replete with stage directions – ‘please dub in a sound effect of tearing fabric and a KA-POW!!!’ – and suggestions for ways to achieve some of the more extreme features, such as a ‘sound effect representing your asshole being stretched to its absolute tensile limit, perhaps the rubbery sound of a balloon animal being tied’. Because the scene will require several gallons of semen, Kant includes a recipe for ‘fake cum’, along with vegan and egg-free variants. The plot of his fantasy is unhinged. Kant imagines himself as an all-powerful villain who lives in a ‘stone castle called Balls-Deep Keep’. He looms up, enormous, while the call boy dwindles ‘down to about eighteen inches’: ‘I’m able to store you in a jar of my cum – you have developed discreet gills adapted to seminal respiration.’ Periodically, Kant pauses the story to offer up accommodating interjections. ‘Not sure if you’re able to induce a full “pink sock” prolapse,’ he writes, ‘but I’d appreciate that, as long as you are 100 per cent confident you can do it safely!’ The contrast between his apologetic demurrals and his dream of domination makes the point: the internet isn’t reality, and that’s the joy of it.

But Tulathimutte’s command of the outlandishness of life online doesn’t always translate to his depictions of the real world. The only hint of tenderness in Rejection appears at the beginning of ‘Pics’, when Alison goes to her friend Neil’s house for their monthly ritual:

He makes her favourite panko-crusted baked mac and cheese with Crystal hot sauce, and she cuts his hair while they stream reality TV. They’d started this ritual back in college, when he was helping her recover from the worst period of her eating disorder by finding and making the one food that she wasn’t revulsed by, and waiting with her after eating it.

The sincerity of their rapport degenerates as soon as they go to bed together. Neil adopts porny affectations (‘he spends way too long sucking her nipples, to the point where she consciously thinks the word latching’) and requests the titular pic, which he takes while Alison is giving him a blowjob.

Kant’s bravado is punctuated by anxious qualifications, but most of Tulathimutte’s characters are nothing but their online avatars: pure shtick, without any interior life. It would be interesting to see him turn his skills to the plight of someone who isn’t simply loathsome and inauthentic – not because fiction has to be populated by good guys, but because most people are at least marginally more complex than they appear online.

Yet for all its ruthlessness, there is something optimistic about Rejection. When Bee’s mother catches sight of her Twitter timeline and asks her to explain a post, Bee thinks:

The hermeticism of posting disease is exactly its appeal. The difficulty of describing a single event online without offering detailed case histories, associated subcultures and rap sheets, and beyond that the meta of the platform: the valences of blocking v. soft-blocking v. muting, DMs v. mentions v. subtweets, going private v. deactivating v. suspension, these uncodified cues and tacit slights spawning an infinity of faux pas. This was salon culture, blue checkmark as painted birthmark.

Tulathimutte recognises that the internet has all the elements of great fiction: Talmudic feats of interpretation, endless layers of intertextual reference, reposts and ripostes, the subtle slights that are the stuff of the novel of manners (the soft block v. the mute!), genres with distinctive requirements, triumphs of lunatic self-fashioning. And then there is the conspicuous preference for unreality, the more unreal the better. In the midst of her posting craze, Bee thinks: ‘I often wonder if this is what I want to do, sit inside year-round, devising notional people.’ She is describing the work of an online troll – and of a fiction writer.