Walking wounded

Stories featuring a cast of characters whose malevolence hides the loneliness of being cast aside by society.

- BY SAM GASKIN

What does literary fiction have to offer the chronically online - people who spend more time gaming, gooning and doomscrolling than reading? And what do the chronically online have to offer fiction writers; what plot points can be crafted from our inaction, what motivation from our compulsive sating of surface desires?

There are reasons fiction hasn't kept pace with the changing ways we live. Thai-American author Tony Tulathimutte, who's 41, nevertheless plays catch-up in his book of stories, Rejection, upping the difficulty by casting powerfully self-pitying, misanthropic, misogynistic and malevolent characters, people who not only experience rejection but come to identify as rejects.

In the opening story, The Feminist, we meet a “nice guy”, a gender studies major who, despite devoting all his energy to understanding women, just can't get laid. The Feminist blames his narrow shoulders, but it's socially that he's most underdeveloped; flirtation's “subtextual cues no more perceptible to him than ultraviolet radiation”.

The Feminist is comically desperate to come across as an ally, his online dating profile leading with “Unshakeably serious about consent. Abortion's #1 fan”. Despite virtue-skywriting in public, he privately stews about the broad-shouldered guys getting the girls. “Dragging his virginity like a body bag,” the wound of rejection turns septic and he adopts an incel’s checklist of obsessions and anxieties: depotestosterone, canthal tilt, death-grip syndrome.