Today you can’t really characterise someone without including their online image and, while I believe few authors do this well, there are those who embody the internet masterfully. One such author is Tony Tulathimutte, who populates his books with characters whose emergence into adulthood ran parallel to the internet’s evolution.
Tulathimutte’s second novel, Rejection, is compiled of multiple stories of those forged by the cruel online worlds they inhabit that become isolated as they burrow further into their prospective digital realms.
Beginning with The Feminist, a snapshot of a narrow-shouldered man trying desperately to date women, becoming more and more undatable as the years fly by, Rejection endeavours to offer many different characters who identify themselves distinctly from one another. The closeted gay man more accustomed to anime porn than actual sex, the cis woman hardened from years of fickle dating app experiences and the protein-shake start-up jock might all use different online platforms but all domains lead to the same depressing endgame.
Very few of Rejection’s unsettling narrative twists take place in the real world and yet they have earth-shattering consequences. Through each lonely individual, who I hesitate to call extremely online because they seem just as connected as most of us in the 21st century, Tulathimutte delivers a darkly humorous novel shifting through the microcosms of the internet with a pessimistic view of our gilded digital cage.
Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte is out 13 February (HarperCollins, £16.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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