Rejection: Fiction

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.