Tony Tulathimutte: ‘A short story can do almost anything a novel can.’
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Congratulations on the UK release of your short story collection, Rejection. I’ve seen the book compared to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground. I can see the parallels, can you?
He’s always been a huge influence on me, as well as like, Thomas Bernhard and Philip Roth. I tend to enjoy writers who are good at writing gasbags; those who are in love with the sound of their own awful voice. It’s something I think I’m good at myself for totally mysterious reasons. So, yeah, big influence on me.
It made a huge impression on me too. I don’t know how to feel about that still, but anyway. How old were you when you first read Notes, and what did you make of it at the time?
I read it in high school alongside Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and the two are perfect counterpoints. Both are satirical, but one is distant and omniscient, while the other is intensely interior. Tolstoy actually posits a kind of solution in the form of religious sincerity, while Dostoyevsky just kind of goes all in on scab picking.
Yeah, those two are always pitted against one another. I suppose one distinction that’s stuck with me is that Tolstoy’s work is polished, that it demonstrates craftsmanship while Dostoyevsky’s so raw and forceful that he has to forgo structure altogether.
That’s definitely a real distinction. I also see one with respect to how Tolstoy has a great desire to redeem his characters and I think that Dostoevsky sees his job as mainly to depict the sort of illness of modernity without necessarily positing a cure. But, you know, the guy was always on deadlines, so maybe he would have gotten around to it if he had had more time [laughs].
Maybe. So, do you see yourself doing something similar to Dostoyevsky in Rejection?
Yeah, I’d say that’s right. If there’s any kind of redemptive prescription in the book, it’s buried under so many layers of misdirection that I don’t expect anyone to find it. The superficial, and even the subcutaneous layers of the book are pretty cynical.
There’s definitely a lot of cynicism in the stories as well as in your novel, Private Citizens. That has me thinking about the two mediums – the novel and the short story. Did you approach them differently?
Process-wise, it didn’t feel that different because I write in a nonlinear, fragmented way. I collect these baskets of notes that come together into larger ideas, while others fall away. The form that the final product takes mostly has to do with the ways I am able to connect them. With Private Citizens, it just so happened that I was able to create a loose plot connection between the four million plotlines and move the book along that way. But, as a whole, Rejection doesn’t really progress in terms of plot. The individual stories mostly create an illusion of plot by having things happen to a character and their personality develop in response – though the events themselves are pretty disconnected.
Yeah, that’s interesting. A couple of years ago, I took a class about the art of the short story that tried to distinguish between the novel and the short story. Poe, for example, said that a short story is concerned with evoking a single mood. Do you agree with that, or do you think short stories should do something else?
A short story can do a lot of things. I recently taught Lydia Davis’s story ‘A Mown Lawn’. It’s just a paragraph long, yet it moves through bits of wordplay on the titular phrase. So, that’s a story that posits, ‘what if a short story can move and resolve itself on the basis of sound and spelling rather than plot or a development of ideas or motifs?’ A short story can absolutely set a mood too, but it can also just do exactly what a novel does. In an abbreviated sense, ‘The Feminist’, for example, takes place over about 30 years. It has the kind of movement that you tend to expect from novels, but it just has a really distant point-of-view, and events are described quickly. A short story can do almost everything a novel can, just shorter.
I wonder how you went about writing ‘The Feminist’, the first story that appears in Rejection which was initially published with n+1 in 2019. It’s brilliant. How did it come to fruition?
It was the first story I came up with back in 2011 as a part of a suite of three sketches that I wanted to write that I was calling something like ‘studies for rejection’. Back then, I had the idea of an extremely multi-form book that would include essays and weird jokes and a glossary and logical proofs – things like that. That story would’ve been the fiction element.
You can’t experience cringe without empathy.
The only idea I had about it was a guy who gets rejected a lot because all I knew was that wanted to write about rejection. So, I’m like, I’ll just write this guy in these scenarios where he gets rejected. And it didn’t really move. It felt very redundant and stagnant. I put it aside for a while after workshopping it and came back to it around 2017 by which point the idea of the sort of disingenuous, try-hard male feminist was floating around ambiently, as was the bugbear of the incel mass shooter. And I figured that coordinating the two archetypes as a sort of Breaking Bad style development for the story would provide a sense of movement. Though I didn’t realise this until I sent it to n+1, and they were like ‘this does not have an ending’. That’s when I decided to sort of push it over the brink.
Yeah, what an ending… However dark it is, I still can’t remember a story making me cringe throughout as it did, at least not intentionally. What do you think makes cringe comedy so effective?
I think it’s worth deconstructing the idea. You can’t experience cringe without empathy – without feeling the second-hand embarrassment of someone else. And you can’t be moved to assume it for yourself, unless you see yourself in it, right?
Sadly.
You know what I mean. But there’s also an element of contempt, like, ‘that couldn’t be me’. What makes it comic and cathartic is something like Hobbes’ theory of humour – he said something along the lines of all comedy stems from our sudden sense of superiority over another person. When you see somebody trip and fall, it’s like, ‘ha ha ha, I’m better than that’. And that makes me think of cringe. It’s this kind of meeting ground between these almost opposed forces where you have to be empathetic enough to put yourself in that position, but also, have the distance of laughing at another person’s misfortune. And the tension between the two is unstable. I think that it actually accounts for a lot of the response I’ve seen to the book already, which is that people almost disavow it at the same time that they praise it. Jia Tolentino’s review said something like, ‘I didn’t know I could have such a good time reading about a bunch of huge fucking losers.’ There’s this sort of recoil or distancing from the subject matter because there’s something in us that makes us want to not fully associate ourselves or relate, even if we do relate on some level.
Are you trying to get the reader to confront themselves in that way?
I just don’t think about the reader. The only way in which I think about readers is as a sort of abstract construct to help me figure out what’s working or not in the story. But as for an actual effect I’m hoping to have on actual readers, that doesn’t really go much further than being like, ‘I hope they think it’s like compelling or funny or true or something’.
Well, reader, what are you reading these days?
Let’s see. I’m currently reading Mason and Dixon by Thomas Pynchon. It’s incredible – Pynchon is, like, the ninth Wonder of the World. Another thing that I really felt made a dent in me is Nagata Kabi’s graphic novels. It’s this non-stop succession of misery and suffering but written with so much ebullience that makes it almost tragic. You’re like, ‘I can’t trust that you are as optimistic as you seem’, and that creates an interesting tension in reading them. I also enjoyed The Gift by Barbara Browning which is about this lady who really likes sending emails and writing about sending emails. It’s definitely what you’d call autofiction but done in kind of an oddball and interesting way.
Autofiction is the personal essay with plausible deniability.
Would you ever be interested in writing some autofiction yourself? Is that a genre that’s—
Absolutely not. No, I mean, like, you know, in a weird way, the meta-fictional inclusion of myself in this book is a weird joke on my complete lack of interest in writing about myself, because even when I decided to take this very multi-form approach to the book, the one prohibition I put on myself was like, ‘I’m not going to write about myself’. Of course, you can’t avoid putting yourself into your characters in different ways, but stuff that is overtly about me or seems to be is just, yeah, it’s just kind of a gag.
Ok, so we won’t be expecting any autofiction from you. But it very much is the genre of the moment, why’d you think that’s the case?
I’ve tweeted before that autofiction is the personal essay with plausible deniability. It’s the ability to spill your guts but leave a question mark at the end. I think one reason it’s so popular right now is due to the increasingly prevalent idea of the work being an expression of an authorial personality or sensibility to which you have greater access because of things like social media, publicity and interviews like this, right? It’s this new idea of the writer as a public figure or celebrity who is accessible, especially as you get millennial and Gen Z writers in the mix, whose public images may have even preceded their writing.
It’s funny you should say. I’ve followed you on Twitter for a while and you’re a prolific poster. How do you square your writing with your online persona?
I once met a writer who said, ‘I was a big fan of your first book, but after reading your Twitter, I thought, maybe this guy’s not so smart after all.’ I can’t be offended by that because my aim in going online is to have the freedom to be stupid – to be a vector for the garbage I’m exposed to. Like a mollusc that’s filtering sludge, and taking it into my flesh to flavour and tenderise it.
But you know, I would never really get too serious online, I don’t think it’s the right venue for it. I save anything actually meaningful I have to say for my writing.
This could sound ridiculous but I’ve always believed that tweeting is its own artform, kind of aphoristic, isn’t it?
Oh, there’s no question – people who are great at Twitter are great writers in that form. I mean, some people were just known as great, you know, aphorists like Ambrose Bierce. I don’t know why that wouldn’t just be slotted in the same genre.
So, who are your favourite Twitter posters?
Recently, it’s been this guy who goes by @sabatonfan69. He’s incredibly good at painting a whole incredibly surreal scene in a few words, punctuated every now and then with an almost lapidary, extremely human thought, like, ‘yeah, I’m at this party farting. I don’t give a fuck.’
Lovely. Before I let you go, Rejection’s been so well received in the US, and now that it’s finally come out in the UK, any thoughts on how you think British audiences will respond to it?
I’m absolutely waiting with bated breath because I love British literature, and I’m interested to see how it’ll play there. I, at the very least, hope that they like me shitting on the US version of The Office. I did that for you guys.
I’m sure they’ll feel seen for a change. Thank you, Tony, and congratulations again.
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Tony Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens and Rejection. He’s received a Whiting Award and an O. Henry Award, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and has written for The Paris Review, N+1, The New York Times, Playboy, The Nation, and others. He also runs CRIT, a writing class in Brooklyn.
Lilia Fetini is studying for the CFA exam and writes when the mood strikes.
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