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| Tony Tulathimutte (photo: Clayton Cubitt) |
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Tony Tulathimutte has written for the Paris Review, N+1, the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New Republic, Playboy, and elsewhere. He received a Whiting Award and an O. Henry Award, and lives in New York. His novel Private Citizens was published in 2016. His follow-up is Rejection (Morrow; reviewed in this issue), a collection of seven linked stories about nonacceptance that is one of the funniest and, as is often true of works incorporating humor, one of the most serious works of literary fiction in a long time. Tulathimutte spoke with Shelf Awareness about the themes of this book, online culture, and questions of representation.
Rejection is a close-to-home topic for an author, but beyond the obvious, what inspired you to choose that theme?
As a fiction writer, I like taking on subjects that are entirely foreign and unknown to me, so even though I have never been rejected, I relished the challenge of imagining what it would be like to be rejected, which has never happened to me even once, for anything. Typically when I ask out strangers on dates, all I have to do is point at them, then myself, then the exit. If I want a story published, I turn to my pet falcon and whisper, "I'm ready to send out my latest 16,000-word piece," and off it goes, and instantly I've got a thousand e-mail notifications draining my phone battery. So the research was daunting, as you can imagine.
Much of this book is hilarious, yet it takes a serious turn. Can you discuss humor and its ability to address serious themes? Were other novels an inspiration?
To me it seems self-evident that humor is not inherently trivializing, and moreover the M.O. of satire is to make its point by trivializing its subject. Humor and seriousness (in the sense of gravity or importance) are non-overlapping magisteria; the former is aesthetic and the latter moral. I don't think there were any specific novels I had in mind while writing, but Nabokov is never far from my mind as a writer with a tight grip on irony and really good pompous characters.
Why did you present this material as a novel-in-stories?
Actually my original idea was to make the book a kind of centaur of fiction and nonfiction. The nonfiction part consisted of a long rambling essay and a bunch of weird junk, like glossaries, jokes, lit crit, and fake logical proofs. I was even considering a dos-à-dos format where you'd finish one part, flip it over, and start with the other side. But the fiction got awkwardly longer than the nonfiction, so I eventually reworked the nonfiction into standalone pieces.
You devote much of this book to online culture. What are your feelings toward it? How do you see it evolving?
For the most part my writing about the Internet is just a naturalistic portrayal of how these characters, who are lonely, neurotic, well-educated middle-class Americans born on or after 1983, tend to live, or avoid living. "Main Character" is an exception, as it's about how the Internet affects how people conceptualize their identities. I don't have any feelings about the Internet that I don't have about people in general, but I will say it's ironic that a medium intended to promote transparency, connection, and freedom of information has assplanted on all three. It's not strictly because of human nature, but because of the way the tech oligarchs have exploitatively structured it for profit and control, and this will only get worse as long as the Internet remains privately controlled by devils and hobgoblins. If we're going to be on there, we have to be as ungullible as possible, and conscious of when our levers of rage, envy, horniness, despair, and validation are getting pulled. But that's playing defense and really what I'd like is to see Twitter and Facebook get demolished by kinetic orbital strikes and replaced with whatever the online equivalent of public spaces might be.
Let's talk about the issues of identity, gender nonconformity, and other taxonomies Bee cites in "Main Character." How do you feel about Bee's rejection of "this idea that your identity imbues you with membership"?
With that story I wanted to get into the problems around identity-based representation: its inherent incompleteness, the way it takes for granted a primacy of identity in your personhood, and the ways it can be exploited, both socially and technologically. In real life you generally have to accept these imperfections just to exist and, certainly, as Binh says, it's a necessary consideration when politics are involved. With Bee I wanted a character who gets tokenized or manipulated whenever they've tried to play the identity game, and becomes so steadfastly antisocial that they'd refuse to make any compromises, and are willing to sacrifice any and all relationships if it means getting to define themselves, leading to their complicated sort of revenge at the end. As for how I feel about it, I wouldn't have written it if I didn't share at least some of their frustrations, but my characters are always more selfish than I am because that's funnier.
Several of the white males here are imperfect allies of female and Asian characters. What makes a good ally? To what extent is allyship possible?
I can't answer that without being reductive, but mostly I think it comes down to treating people with unbegrudging respect and not giving lip service to inequality. The problem usually is either ignorance or insincerity--someone overestimates their understanding, or only wants to appear and to regard themselves as an ally while being altogether useless. Occasionally you get the outright frauds or grifters working in bad faith, like the racefaker in "Main Character." The conservatives would have you believe that this describes all attempts at allyship, and that you can only trust in atavistic self-interest where race is concerned. It's more that being an ally just takes more effort and selflessness than most people are willing to commit to and some would rather relieve themselves of guilt by denying it's possible or worthwhile.
Many authors have included themselves in their fiction. Tony Tulathimutte makes an appearance here. How did you intend that to comment on the book?
It's not really a comment on anything so much as a result of the desire to progress the book by way of orthogonal turns, and "Main Character" is the story that breaks the seal on metafiction, whereas all the previous stories are straight fiction. There's lots of these kinds of macro-level formal games I tried to play, and I don't want to spoil them by spelling them out here.
In the context of the story, which is about the "identity" of the narrator in many senses, I thought it'd be funny to play off of the natural tendency for readers to read through the lens of the author, with the upshot being that Bee's project of owning their own representation has, in a roundabout way, spiraled into them authoring their own author. --Michael Magras