Review

Notes

• The Feminist (p1)
  • p11 - But if agonizing about being a creep is what proves he’s not a creep, and he stops worrying about being a creep, wouldn’t that make him a creep?
  • p13 - Taking trips and seeing movies and attending events all seem pointless without anyone to experience them with, so it feels like his life cannot progress or even truly begin until he has found someone who will return his love.
• Pics (p31)
  • Interesting portrayal of texting. No bother about picking up a phone really, just hard cuts to different type and formatting. Some discussion of scrolling through…
  • p46 - The friendship, it seems, has been quietly ruined by its reckless redistricting. … thinking about how his rejecting her to preserve their friendship is exactly what ended it, how it used to be a happy voluntary arrangement, and has now become something she is forced to settle for.
  • p47 - Alison realizes she has nothing new to report about her life that doesn’t in some way involve trying to get over him.
  • p63 - She knows casual sex isn’t inherently degrading, and any stigma around it is backward and boring, so it’s extra annoying that her own experiences are failing to affirm her, convincing her that she must be doing things wrong and is somehow different, otherwise she would not be finding herself reigniting the slut-shame she thought she’d intellectually smothered in college.
  • p65 - No surprise, then, that she finds solace in the simplicity of hate—how comforting it feels to hate Neil, how succulent the fantasy that the world’s full complement of injustice could be concentrated in one stupid guy, and that to hate him silently, invent ways to undermine him, conscript others into this project, was to increase the world’s fairness.
  • p71 - What hurts the most is knowing that his rejection of her was fair.
  • p91 - And she will feel the same, nothing, and think, maybe I am nothing, and this is the best I can offer to others, my absence in their lives, though they will never notice it or thank me. Still, their lives will be better for it.
• Agegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression (p92)
  • p95 - After a year goes by with his sexuality still theoretical, Kant suspects he must build his resume. The apps, everyone says, the apps! But when he tries one it feels like a minuscule butcher shop, an infinite display case of rumps, loins, and wursts. Quickly he acquires a horrid efficiency at rejecting men on the basis of a two-inch photo or two-line bio—for having close-set eyes, or long gums, or because they kayak, believe in astrology, say they have “man fur.” Even as he is vexed to discover his unjustified pickiness, what really inhibits him is imagining the men on the other end looking at his own unsmiling, gormless photo and laughing at it.
  • p108 - So all of this caretaking is just pointless sublimation, Kant knows, he really is a genius at channeling his bullshit into laudable endeavors, and it only deepens his conviction that he’ll never be able to give Julian the easy loving he deserves, so maybe he should end things before they get any more entangled, so that it won’t hurt as much to leave him.
  • p111 - Kant realizes it sounds like he’s fishing for compliments, and that in doing so he might find the lake empty. He apologizes and stares at his stupid face in the sideview mirror, getting sucked into an emotional gravity well where he pities Julian for dating such a loser, and resents Julian for pitying him, and pities himself for being pitied, all of which cancel out into silence.
  • Just a ton of notes between 108-120.
  • p125 - my note, not from book: This book having the strange effect of me seeing my anxities in others & the stuff like this and making me feel pleasantly normal by comparison.
  • Hex code for perfect homemade simulacum - (#)F6F3E9. No comment.
• Our Dope Feature (p143)
  • No specific notes on this one, just an overriding sense of what an asshole the narrator is, and how horrible. So little insight and of course that is the point.
• Main Character (p170)
  • p200 - my note: Realizing this book is taking every thought and emotion that rejection unsettles and stretches them out far, far, into their maximum. Sometimes even past satire and into total absurdity.
  • p201 - …the years I’d wasted in self-recrimination for betraying myself when there was no self to betray.
  • p231 - I guess we feel responsible to the image of ourselves we’ve installed in other people’s heads.
  • p238 - my note: hilarious introduction of the author into this sort of meta-narrative in a quasi-fourth-wall break. Really enjoyed all this.
• Sixteen Metaphors (p244)
  • My note: This little collection of metaphors is pretty depressing. So, basically, I like most of them. A lot of them are pretty mean-spirited about the self. Very in line with the rest of the book.
  • p245 - There are plenty of fish in the sea. But you’re not a fish, just an ugly idiot trying to catch one.
  • p246 - On a road trip, your friends in the front seats are enjoying their conversation; you can barely catch a single word. When you try to lean forward and contribute, they listen, kbut you can tell they’re annoyed by the effort to include you, so you stop trying. By the time you reach your destination, they’ve forgotten you’re in the car at all, and they drop the car off at the rental place with you still in it. You consider saying something about it, then think better of it, because you don’t want them to feel bad.
• Re: Rejection (p249)
  • Another snicker-inducing meta-narrative. It basically summarizes the short stories and pokes holes in them. Lots of fun.
  • p257 - Perhaps this is why the protagonists of Rejection each at some point, after restlessly shuttling between concealing and revealing, eventually retreat to isolation, their only sure defense.
  • p258 - …the final irony, one that at least your writing seems to grasp, is that rejection is not one-way, and always comes paired with its opposite. For a rejection to be settled, first you–the reject–must hear, and comprehend, and accept.

Review

I have been habitually in the book store on Saturdays around 10 or 11am for no good reason since getting back into town. I have a 4x4 IKEA KALLAX shelf at home stuffed with unread books and a pile of books on my coffee table and on my record player just staring at me. Yet, I keep going to the store. Anyway, I saw this sitting on the new arrivals table and had a skim of the inner jacket and a random page and thought, well, fuck it. Why not.

My first read of the characters was often one of really unfortunate familiarity, or at least empathy. Thankfully, that familiarity ends at pretty abrupt points in each narrative. There is a place in each where the author takes the commonality of emotional experience and the emotions and thoughts that rejection unsettles within you and stretches them far, far, across the horizon. To the point of almost total absurdity. This makes them feel a little safer to read because you can sit there and feel much better about yourself and point and say, “hey! I’m doing better than I thought!” Then of course the next story starts and you have to see characters doing things you do or think and start chewing your lip again, hoping they too will pass beyond the veil of reasonable personhood.

Not all of the stories were relatable (thankfully). “Our Dope Future” features a narrator speaking via probably-reddit post. The “OP” features no insight whatsoever and describes the absolute worst behavior you can imagine away as being considerate and kind and empowering and blah blah blah. It’s a short story that feels ridiculous and stupid, until you think about it for a few minutes and know that if you went to reddit or twitter you would see people just like this and that is pretty unsettling.

Then there’s “Main Character” which does have some relatable lines and things that threw me back into the past (mIRC lol, SomethingAwful). The ‘protagonist’ of this story recedes so far into the internet that they start to question their sense of self. They come to believe or want to believe that they are literally nothing, nobody. There is something there. I’m realizing I have a habit of saying “everyone” or “all of us” to generalize emotional experience rather than being vulnerable about mine and so I will go to a branch and say, yeah, I think I have felt like no one at all before. Or wanted to be no one at all, because it would be easier. It’s a pretty dark place, and so naturally when the author stretches this out to absurdity in this particular story, it goes to strange places.

“Main Character” was not my favorite of the stories, but it is one of the funniest. It also does a lot of meta-narrative stuff, especially towards the end, that always makes for a fun time.

I suppose my favorite of the stories is “Ahegao, or, The Ballad of Sexual Repression.” Probably because this is the sole gay story, and there are certain experiences in the first half that are just very relatable to extents. I definitely remember driving 40 minutes to an insanely questionable hookup and leaving distinctly nonplussed when I was like 20 years old and living in rural Illinois. Hey folks! It’s a weird old life.

“Ahegao” also becomes perhaps the funniest and most outlandish of the stories. It even features a recipe and hex code (HEX CODE! written in my giant shocked handwriting in the margin) of the perfect simulacum, which is apparently (#)F6F3E9. No comment.

The story also goes way(!!) into the absurd by about the midpoint and continues to escalate into an ending that made me cackle and cringe. Like I said, you feel a lot of empathy and I at least feel a measure of relatability to several of the characters before the point comes when they jump the shark. That makes it more comfortable to read because, frankly, if you were just reading a book about bummed out people getting rejected and becoming more bummed out, you would be a lot more bummed out by the end of it.

Most of these characters cannot get out of their head. They are overthinkers that have had 8 cups of coffee and whatever other chemical or nootropic they can find that will let them mine themselves deeper into that catacomb. They cannot get out of their own way. Even when they get things they want, they cannot believe it, and they sabotage their lives with their lack of trust and lack of belief and hatred of self. What they cannot do is communicate their feelings, either to themselves or to the people they care about. If they could think about themselves with more care, and be kinder, I think that trust would grow, and they with it. I think this is part of what the author suggests in his final line: “…rejection is not one-way, and always comes paired with its opposite. For a rejection to be settled, first you–the reject–must hear, and comprehend, and accept.”

Overall I really liked the book. It gives you the opportunity to scrawl in the margin, “oh please, don’t do this to yourself” or “you don’t have to do that” knowing full well that you (or at least I) would do those same things or ruminate over similar experiences, though hopefully to a much lesser extent. At least until they go into the absurd and you can feel a little bit better about yourself by comparison, which is a nice little treat. For those you can scrawl, “holy shit” or “wtf” or “oh my god,” which is a lot more fun than seeing yourself in the book! My annotated copy will certainly have to go on the “think about it before loaning out” shelf. Then again, a lot of the characters in this book are the way they are because they refuse to be vulnerable, they refuse to believe people, and they refuse to trust themselves and the people around them. So, maybe weaving that fine line between good boundaries and bad boundaries helps everyone out.

Redacted

From “My first read” paragraph:

• There is no pleasant rejection, and even kind ones, even ones where there feels like there is just a little mutuality, are not happy. And I don’t know how other people process these things, but for me it’s a lot of… Whatever. Maybe I think the idea of processing something like this is, wow I don’t know. It’s not like it’s easy work, anyway…