A guidebook for life (9-16-24)

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/16/books/review/tony-tulathimutte-rejection.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/13/magazine/tony-tulathimutte-rejection.html

After Stanford, with its built-in social scene, Tulathimutte found himself baffled by adult life, which came with no instruction manual. “What do people do?” he remembers asking a friend. “Like, do they go to bars?” Post-college cluelessness emerged as the central theme of the novel he eventually began writing, “Private Citizens,” which centers on four recent Stanford graduates living in the Bay Area.

Crusading moralism — to say nothing of nihilistic bigotry — tends to drown out patient reflection. “Rejection” deftly captures the berserking energies of the internet (in one story, Twitter is marvelously described as “an improv class, press conference, intervention, Klan rally, comics convention, struggle session, and suicide hotline all booked in the same conference room”), but it also brings a deep imaginative sympathy to the new kinds of people that the internet and its rolling identitarian controversies are creating.

Online, the incel and the try-hard male ally, the two contemporary archetypes that get fused in “The Feminist,” are objects of satire and abuse. What makes Tulathimutte’s story so powerful is that its main character is much harder to dismiss. If Tulathimutte abhors his protagonist’s noxious views, he also has tremendous compassion for the pain that led him to embrace them. Consider the fathomless insecurity conveyed by the simple phrase “he’s read” in the following bravura sentence: “Dragging his virginity like a body bag into his mid-twenties, he watches a certain amount of domination-oriented porn, probably due to internalized sexism, though he’s read that porn is a safe, healthy venue to explore kink, that sexuality is neither a choice nor shameful, especially if the studios follow good labor and aftercare practices.” That a person so lost should find such solace and validation in the online community of narrow-shouldered men (“the only people on earth to take seriously his suffering and acknowledge that he isn’t to blame for it”) makes a tragic kind of sense.

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