Rejection — Tony Tulathimutte
A review of Tony Tulathimutte’s novel about grievance, desire and the damage done by living inside constant self-narration.
272 pages · Kindle edition · 2025
Grievance Without Exit
I tore through Rejection. It is sharp, fast, and difficult to put down. The audiobook, with its rotating narrators, intensifies rather than softens the experience, giving each voice its own rhythm of anger, need and justification.
The book is built around rejection in its many forms. Romantic failure. Sexual frustration. Social exclusion. Professional slight. Each section follows a character who believes they have been denied something owed to them. What Tulathimutte understands is how grievance becomes a way of organising life. In “Ahegao”, repression itself becomes the trap. Kant polices his desires so tightly that a minor lapse carries disproportionate consequences, exposing how self-control turns into self-punishment. These characters do not simply experience rejection. They rehearse it, explain it and return to it until it hardens into identity.
The novel is steeped in online consciousness. Dating apps, message boards, group chats and algorithmic logic shape how people interpret themselves and others. At times the book feels aggressively digital, but that saturation is deliberate. The internet here is not background. It is a cognitive environment. Desire becomes transactional. Injury becomes proof. Morality becomes performance.
What makes the book work is control beneath the noise. Each section is carefully constructed, even when the voice feels unhinged. The humour cuts sharply and then curdles. Self-awareness never produces insight. Characters articulate their damage with fluency while remaining trapped inside it. Tulathimutte does not rescue them, and he does not correct them.
The audiobook deserves particular mention. The multiple narrators prevent the book from collapsing into sameness. Hearing these voices aloud makes the self-justifications more uncomfortable and the emotional loops harder to escape. The effect is immersive and exhausting in equal measure.
This is not a comforting book, and it does not ask for sympathy. It captures how resentment survives by narrating itself endlessly, especially in spaces that reward visibility over reflection. The excess is the method. The irritation is part of the design.
A brutal, precise novel that understands how modern grievance sustains itself. One of the most accurate portrayals I have read of how people talk themselves into isolation while insisting on connection.