I DON’T REMEMBER WHEN I first heard the term “incel” but I do recall my reaction: I don’t want to know about these guys. You feel sympathy for

Trolling Alone – Bookforum Magazine

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2024-10-30 07:00:05

I DON’T REMEMBER WHEN I first heard the term “incel” but I do recall my reaction: I don’t want to know about these guys. You feel sympathy for lonely people, of course, but it would seem that their constitution as a class or identity category in the internet age, while perhaps inevitable, can only compound the misery and increase the rage, to say nothing of the occasional outbursts of violence. You hope that they quiet down and get their shit together (not in a Jordan Peterson way) and come back when they’ve stopped being angry about the wrong things, or better yet that they just go on to lead peaceful private lives with friends, lovers, spouses, or families, if that’s what they want so badly. Instead, the rest of us have been subjected to an endless stream of tedious journalistic and sociological examinations of these sad souls, their grievances, their traumas, their delusions, even their quixotic plastic surgeries. I can’t claim to be an expert on or even a regular reader of the genre, except when these accounts overlap with profiles of mass shooters. But before these superfluous men were treated as a class, they were a literary and cinematic staple, from Notes from Underground through Taxi Driver to Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. 

Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection: Fiction owes a debt to the last of those works, both formally and in terms of its high level of comic self-consciousness. It consists of seven sections: five discrete but linked narratives about characters experiencing various sorts of rejection—some of them self-inflicted, others not at all—and two shorter pieces that serve as thematic codas. Tulathimutte’s excellent first novel, Private Citizens,established him as a chronicler of his generation—millennials of the highly educated, very online variety—and was structured along the lines of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections,with several entwined narrative arcs about former undergraduate dormmates rising, swooping, and at last resolving in the direction of redemption, as its four characters recover from their various breakdowns together. The connections between characters in Rejection are slighter—even in the case of lovers (not quite the right word for what transpires) and siblings—and the ends they come to are not happy or redemptive: they vanish, disappoint, suffer humiliation, commit mass homicide. Tulathimutte has said he thought of it as a novel while he was writing, and the book does have the thrust of novelistic unity. 

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