The Daily - The Sunday Read: ‘An Acerbic Young Writer Takes Aim at the Identity Era’

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

There was something distinctly unrelaxed about the way that Tony Tulathimutte, one of the more talented young writers at work in America today, announced the publication of “The Feminist,” a new short story, back in the fall of 2019.“To be clear in advance,” Tulathimutte wrote on Twitter, “feminism is good, this character is not good.”These days, when the faintest gust of heterodoxy is enough to start an internet stampede, it may be wise to put some moral distance between yourself and your protagonists, but as Tulathimutte soon found out, it’s no guarantee you won’t be caught in the crush. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

My name is Giles Harvey. I'm a contributing writer to the New York Times magazine and I often cover literature and the literary world. A couple of years ago I read a short story by the Thai-American writer Tony Thula Thamuthi called The Feminist. The story is about a young guy who prides himself on being an upstanding feminist ally and the central problem in his life is that women keep rejecting him and he can't understand why. And after a while he begins to spend a lot of time on misogynistic online message boards where he's radicalized and transformed into a violent anti-feminist ideologue. The story is a bit like the 40-year-old Virgin,

the John Appetow movie, but as reimagined by Philip Roth at his most outrageous and incandescent. Which is to say, it's both deeply disturbing and very, very funny. And I was just electrified by it. Tony was writing about contemporary identity politics with a candor and an intelligence that I hadn't really seen from other serious fiction writers of his generation. I know it's a vague and somewhat overused term, but when I say identity politics, I'm talking about an approach to politics and just how we understand ourselves as people in the world that foregrounds categories like race or gender or sexual orientation. And as you're probably aware, it's created a ferocious backlash from conservatives, as well as plenty of controversy within liberal communities.

And it was clear from reading The Feminist that Tony wasn't afraid to steer directly into these debates and to use them as his fictional material. What I thought was incredible about The Feminist is that even though Tony clearly finds his protagonist's misogynistic views hateful, he still writes about the guy with tremendous compassion. And he allows us to feel the pain and the isolation that led the protagonist to embrace those ideas in the first place. And I think that kind of moral and imaginative sympathy is extremely valuable right now when people are very quick to assume the worst about anyone they disagree with. And so when I saw Tony had a book coming out

that the feminist would be a part of, I thought, I want to write about that. And I wanted to talk to Tony. I've interviewed a lot of writers for the Times Magazine and they tend to be cagey about acknowledging an autobiographical basis for their writing. But I found Tony to be a guy who was very forthcoming about the struggles he's faced in his life and he was pretty open about his romantic struggles in particular. That said, I don't want to give the impression that he's a downer. He's actually incredibly entertaining, both in person and in his fiction and also on Twitter where he seems to spend a lot of time.

And I think this willingness to expose himself and to be the butt of his own jokes is one of the things that makes his writing so powerful. Fiction writers I think are always asking themselves the question, what if my life had gone slightly different? And then they imagine what might have followed in that alternate reality. And so in a dark, but also kind of inspiring way, it's possible to see a story like The Feminist as Tony imagining a version of his life in which he wasn't a talented writer and he hadn't achieved the success and recognition that he has but instead was consumed by anger and resentment. I'd had Tony taught a creative writing workshop out of his apartment

in Brooklyn and I asked him if I could join one of those classes. I spent a lot of time in literary spaces in New York and you know they can be weird and competitive and unpleasant in different ways. But I was struck by how warm and generous and relaxed everyone seemed in Tony's class. And that was clearly a vibe that he was setting. And I think that's the paradox of Tony. He told me he feels happiest when he's alone, reading or writing or playing video games in his apartment. His characters are loners and rejects who undergo the most vivid and painful humiliations imaginable. And yet he's at the centre of this growing, supportive community of young writers and he's widely beloved.

So here's my article, read by Ralph Lister. Our producer is Jack DiSodoro and our music was written and performed by Aaron Esposito. There was something distinctly unrelaxed about the way that Toni Tulattomuti, one of the more talented young writers at work in America today, announced the publication of The Feminist, a new short story back in the fall of 2019. To be clear in advance, Tulattamuti wrote on Twitter, feminism is good, this character is not good. A very online author of very online fiction, Tulattamuti sounded for a moment like an 18th century English novelist assuring the gentle reader, lest anyone mistake the purpose of his tale, that he had chosen to portray a scoundrel only so that scoundrels might be more thoroughly reviled.

These days, when the faintest gusts of heterodoxy is enough to start an internet stampede. It may be wise to put some moral distance between yourself and your protagonists. But as Tula Temuti soon found out, it's no guarantee you won't be caught in the crush. The feminist, to be fair, contains more than the gust of heterodoxy. The story, which appeared in N+, the small but influential literary magazine, is a whirlwind of cancelable opinions. Its unnamed protagonist is a try-hard white male ally who doesn't understand why women keep rejecting him. Short, slight and narrow-shouldered, he struggles to compete in the sexual marketplace and finds himself repeatedly friend-zoned. The deeper issue may be an undiagnosed neurodivergence.

He finds the subtextual cues that govern flirting as imperceptible as ultraviolet radiation. Whatever the reason, and despite having read Sanger and Friedan and McKinnon and Dworkin and Firestone and Faludi and Winterson and Butler and Solanas and Schulman and Hooks and Grier, he can't get laid. As the years go by and the rejections pile up, his strident feminism curdles into reactionary bile. He joins an online message board, Narrow Shoulders, Open Minds, where men who have experienced similar rejection stoke one another's grievances. In a bracingly articulate grand synthesis, he declares to his comrades that women have failed feminism. Allowing that no woman in particular is to blame, he nonetheless goes on to argue that, in general, a preponderance of women harbour the very sorts of double standards

feminism sought to eliminate, and indulge a narcissistic victim complex by which they tolerate and even seek out agro-misogyny in their romantic partners, while relying on men of conscience, i.e. men like him, to handle the emotional scutt work. Then he dons a mask, enters a restaurant and guns down the patrons in cold blood. on a mask, enters a restaurant and guns down the patrons in cold blood. Tula Tamuti, who is Thai-American, was worried that readers might conflate him with his character, and not without reason. In interviews, he had confirmed that the one Thai-American character in his acclaimed debut novel Private Citizens, 2016, a well-paid tech worker who has watched most of the porn on the Internet was a self-portrait of sorts.

What's more, Tullutamuti's very funny Twitter feed is full of jokes, not necessarily grounded in reality, about erotic deprivation. The hardest part of writing a novel is describing things you've never done before, like sex, he once tweeted. The feminist created an internet firestorm, becoming the object of impassioned online commentary and the most road piece of fiction in N plus one's 20 year existence. The story was widely praised, but in spite of his precautionary tweet, there was also a widespread failure

to distinguish author from protagonist. Certain feminists denounced it as a full-throated voicing of misogyny. Many anti-feminists read the story in exactly the same way, though for them, it was a cause for celebration. For weeks, Tula Tomuti was inundated by emails and direct messages. Strangers started approaching him in public. Was he the Tony who wrote that story? I got a lot of chilling feedback, Tula Tomuti said recently, reflecting on the episode.

Even though I considered the story almost unforgivably heavy-handed as I wrote it, in practice everyone projected their own politics onto it. It was a Saturday night in late June, and Tula Tomuti, who is 41, was leading a session of CRIID, the creative writing workshop he runs out of his apartment in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. This was the final session of the eight-week class, which he devoted to the pragmatics of the writing life, finding an agent, selling a book, before opening the floor to a marathon Q&A period.

The class had begun at two o'clock that afternoon. It was now almost eleven, and the place was littered with half empty bottles of whiskey and wine. Tulattamuti rhymes with tool in the booty, he tells people. Cut an unflappable figure, sitting cross-legged at the head of his dining room table, in a light blue button-down and beige shorts, imparting wisdom with the poise of a guru. Elvishly short, with fine dark hair and large round glasses, he looks like a precocious teenager, an impression only mildly qualified by his gym-honed biceps and stick-and-poke style tattoos. qualified by his gym-honed biceps and stick-and-poke style tattoos. One of these tattoos seems to spell the word clever in capital letters.

Though when you see it in a mirror, he later pointed out, it says stupid. A neat encapsulation of one of his abiding concerns. The gulf between how we think we're coming off and how we actually are. It's a gulf that's evident in The Feminist as well as in how the story was received. Both the best and the worst thing about writing fiction is that you're designing something to be interpreted in many, often contradictory ways, Tula Temuti was saying now, answering a question about his relationship with readers. That's what makes a text rich, but it can also come with a lot of unintended consequences.

One unintended, but from the author's point of view rather happy consequence of publishing The Feminist has been a significant pay raise. For his novel Private Citizens, which he worked on for more than seven years, Tula Tammuti netted an advance of $20,000. His new book, Rejection, a volume of linked short stories about losers in love, was acquired for $350,000. William Morrow, its publisher, may be hoping for a feminist-style freakout on a larger scale, and perhaps it will get one. Though to suggested rejection, out September 17th is the work of a mere provocateur, is to sell it and its author

preposterously short. Tula Tamuti, a master comedian with a virtuoso prose style, has produced an audacious, original and highly disturbing book that steers directly into the oncoming traffic of current liberal piety. An incandescent satire on the dead language and dead thinking of a corporatized identity politics, rejection bristles with a furious intelligence. In The Feminist, which opens the book, the ally cum incel absurdly commandeers the dialect of identity, claiming, for example, that narrow-shouldered feminist men are in truth the most depressed subaltern group, excluded from both male privilege and female solidarity. In Main Character, by contrast, the narrator, a non-binary asexual Thai American named Bee, rejects this theory-laden parlance, including labels like non-binary asexual Thai

American, which they feel is thrust upon them by preening white liberals. I just want to live without ordering the prefix, be more than an infinitesimal coordinate in a million-dimensional matrix of demographics, they say wearily. Back in class, a student, white, male, had a question. I hate the term cancel culture, he said, but how much does the fear of fallout from certain things affect your writing? Tula Temuti, who kept putting on then taking off a blue baseball cap with the slogan psychically

disturbed was measured in his reply. ''Cancel culture is an imperfect tool, but it's around for a reason,'' he said. ''It's around because our institutions have failed to deliver any justice around the common problems people face day in, day out. At the same time, since there's no formal accountability behind it, that does sometimes lead to abuses, though probably fewer than its critics would believe. But I was more wondering if it had influenced your writing, the student said. Oh, okay, Tula Tomuti replied. Great question. He thought about it for a moment. No. One of Tula Temuti's most appealing traits, both as a writer and as a person, is his disinhibited honesty, his willingness to say just about anything.

The basic trajectory of my life has been that I started off as a really weird idiot, he told me over drinks at a bar near his apartment a few days later, and ended up an insufferable asshole. Later that week I received an email from him saying that he needed to amend this. It's probably closer, he wrote, to boring and remorseful asshole. Tulutamuti, whose parents emigrated from Thailand in the late 1970s, grew up in an Irish Catholic enclave in Western Massachusetts, where Asian Americans were a conspicuous minority.

He had trouble fitting in. For a while, when he was seven or eight, it seemed he had been befriended by two of his neighbours, Eric and Abby, a brother and sister with whom he walked to the school bus each morning. One day, however, when they were going home, Eric said he had something to show him and took out a pencil box. Inside was an egg.

What's that? Tulaomuute innocently asked. In the same moment, Eric cracked it over his head and shouted, flat face! A racist slur. From then on, whenever Tulutomuute saw the siblings, they repeated the insult. He traces his congenital pessimism to such early experiences of bullying. You know, sometimes I feel like Asian kids here get their pick of three survival strategies, B says in Main Character. The first is to assimilate and accept second-class citizenship in exchange for a threadbare mantle of conditional whiteness. The second, to appropriate, hermit crabbing into some more popular minority culture, usually black, sometimes gay or conservative.

And the third, to engage in a cosplay of one's own heritage. Like his protagonist, Tula Temuti discovered a rarer, though no less fraught, fourth way. Despite being a straight-A student who maxed out on extra-curriculars, or, as B describes her closeted brother Kant, the focus of another story in Rejection, a classic first-gen overachieving dork supreme, driven to excellence by fear of punishment and lack of options. He also cultivated an eccentric persona. In high school, when he became a goth, he once wore the same outfit every day for a month.

If this was a bid for attention, it seems not to have worked. No one noticed, or at least no one said anything. As an undergrad at Stanford, Tulutamuti studied symbolic systems, similar to cognitive science programs at other colleges, the kind of major that often leads to a lucrative tech job, but literature was already his consuming passion. A short story he wrote for a fiction workshop, Scenes from the Life of the Only Girl in Watershield, Alaska, was published in the Three Penny Review, a prestigious Bay Area magazine, and went on to win an O. Henry Prize. In his sophomore year, he was recruited to join a writing group that included several

other Asian-American students. One of its members, Jenny Zhang, who is now a celebrated novelist and remains one of Tulate Muti's closest friends, recalls the striking first impression he made. Most people took one look at Tony and assumed he was a dorky Asian guy with glasses and wouldn't have expected him to have such a major personality, she told me. One evening after an event on campus, a group of awestruck students hung around a mingle with the speaker, a creative writing teacher with a cult-like following.

Zhang remembers seeing her friend introduce himself to the teacher. As they shook hands, Tula Temuti suddenly dropped to the floor and began convulsing as though he had been electrocuted. Everyone stopped what they were doing, Zhang said. People were very confused. It lasted an uncomfortably long time. And then Tony stood back up as if nothing had happened. Tula Tamuti told me that he was just trying to stand out. After college, the lucrative tech job was duly forthcoming. He spent the next few years in San Francisco working in user experience. It was a miserable time.

After Stanford, with its built-in social scene, Tulitamuti 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 centres on four recent Stanford graduates living in the Bay Area.

The short stories Tula Temuti had produced up to then were, in his words, realist fiction about sad white people portrayed with capital E empathy. Now, partly under the influence of Philip Roth, whose ribald ethnic comedy struck him as a granting of permission, Tula Temuti started to write in an exuberant, often vicious comic register about material closer to his heart. Ambition and its discontents, social justice movements and their internal contradictions,

the sexual marginalization of Asian men. Tulutamuti was accepted to the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2010 based on the strength of the novel's early chapters, but when he submitted a draft of the opening for critique in his first class there, it was savaged by his peers. Traces of the workshop show up in the finished novel, when Linda Trowland, a skittish hedonist and aspiring writer, is pilloried by the members of an undergraduate writing class. Her imagined response to these naysayers reads like a kind of ours poetica. Why the predictable taste for relatable characters conveyed in manageable little sentences, plot leading inevitably to redemption, books to curl up with?

Where were the readers who wanted to be offended by difficulty, break forms and do violence to the tongue, books to curl up and die in. Private Citizens was rejected by more than 20 publishers, but when it finally appeared, the feedback was more positive. One of the really phenomenal novels I've read in the last decade, said Jonathan Franzen, another of Tula Tammuti's exemplars. The years since Donald Trump announced his first presidential bid have hardly been a heyday for American fiction. Literature is the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account

of variousness, possibility, complexity and difficulty," Lionel Trilling wrote in The Liberal Imagination, 1950. But 75 years later, amid the rise of a homegrown authoritarianism, these qualities can start to look expendable, like mere literary trinkets. At least that's the sense you get from a recent trunche of worthy social novels, books that may as well come with colourful stickers proclaiming, ''In these pages we believe black lives matter, women's rights are human rights, no human is illegal,'' and so on. Such commitments, however well-intentioned, can sometimes come at the expense of a nuanced moral vision and tend

to lead to writing that's effective neither as politics nor art. There is definitely a piety problem, Tula Tomuti told me, summing up the state of today's publishing business. What's so thrilling about rejection is its fearlessness in the face of this piety, its willingness to give offence, not as an end in itself, but as an unavoidable result of speaking honestly about the intimately politicized lives we now lead. Identity labels, as Tula Tomuti sees it, are a mixed blessing. On the one hand, they can make a person newly legible to themselves and provide a sense

of belonging and solidarity. On the other, they can foster a small-minded tribalism and intolerance of dissent. Social media, where much of life today takes place, has proved itself an inimical forum for debates about identity and the epochical shift in self-understanding it represents. 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, clan 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. 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 Tula Tammuti's story so powerful is that its main character is much harder to dismiss. If Tula Temuti appauls 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 red, 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 labour 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. Tulutamuti, to be clear, is far from suggesting that all identitarian communities function in this way, as circle-jerks for damage rejects. I'm not trying to be an iconoclast or contrarian by going after progressive discourse, because that is its own kind of personal branding, for which I have nothing but contempt," he has said. As a fiction writer, he simply believes that the difference between two individuals is often greater and more interesting than the difference between two identity groups.

It is in main character that this belief receives its most powerful articulation. Suppose it's true. This idea that your identity imbues you with membership, a kind of inborn sorority with inherited values and traits. Bee reflects at one point. Sounds nice. You're less alone. You get a shorthand for your oppression that in certain quarters commands deference. It goes some way toward feeling less crazy to understand why it's not your fault you're

treated like dogshit. But I hate having my life judged as the output of generic forces. That however I understand or react to them is secondary to the fact that I share them with others. Identity is diet history, single-serving sociology, at its worst a patriotism of trauma or a prosthesis of personality. He is a kind of imp of the perverse, who's interested not in identity politics, but in what they call identity terrorism, inciting spurious Twitter pylons simply for the thrill of it.

In The Feminist, where they have a walk-on role, Bea incites an IRL pylon against the main character, an old college friend. Unlike the other figures in the book, whose lives are undone by varieties of rejection, Bee seems to reject the world and the idea of good faith engagement with it preemptively. My real life has always been online, they say. After a while, it becomes their only life. Just because Bee's ideas are more cogent than those expressed in The Feminist, however, doesn't mean we ought to take them as authoritative. After all, starting online feuds is hardly a sign of sterling mental health.

This story, like Rejection as a whole, isn't a polemic against identity written up in fictional form. Rather, it's a work of what the Russian critic Mikhail Bakdine called the Dialogic Imagination. It puts various conflicting ideas into play and leaves it to the reader to adjudicate. In person, Tula Temuti made no secret of the fact that romantic rejection has been a major theme of his own life. The book is definitely not written from a place of consoled understanding, he said at his neighborhood bar, nursing a third double whiskey of the night.

The narrative is definitely not. I came through the other side of this. Let me show you how to deal with it. At times, he seems to take a strange kind of pride in his unhappiness, something that the characters in Rejection are often called out for by their friends. You've turned your loneliness into this, like, fetish necklace of martyrdom, someone tells the main character in The Feminist. At this point I vanquished about seven therapists,

Tula Tomuti seemed to boast when I raised the subject. An ex-girlfriend who is now a therapist once said that if she had seen him as a patient she would probably have murdered him. I'm just extremely contrarian and a little bit insistent on my interpretation of things, and I've been told that I have an annoying habit of exhaustively anticipating criticism," he explained with a puckish smile. Rejection ends with an imagined letter from a publisher rejecting the book we just read, and meticulously explaining why each story doesn't work.

For all his love of literature, Tula Temuti was similarly skeptical about its supposed power to transform people's lives. Yes, he allowed, sometimes a book might lead to self-knowledge or take the edge off our human condition. On the other hand, what if the things people discover about themselves from a novel make them want to kill themselves?" he said, really buzzing now. What if they're like, I didn't know I looked like that, that that's the kind of freak I am until I saw it articulated this way, and now it's unbearable to me. I saw it articulated this way, and now it's unbearable to me. Writing rejection certainly hadn't brought him any closure.

The idea of writing as therapy, he said, was largely a myth. Still, I asked, were there not deep satisfactions to be taken from turning pain into art? Yeah, he said with a shrug, finishing his drink. But is that enough? On a tropical Friday evening in July, as thunder echoed over Brooklyn, more than a hundred crit alums packed into an event space in Williams Book for one of the regular book swap parties that Tulutamuti throws. All girls were instructed to bring two books.

Bangers only read the invitation to contribute to a literary potluck. Since starting CRIT in 2017, Tulutamuti has encouraged his students to stay in touch and form writing groups of their own as a way to keep themselves accountable to their ambition. The group he joined at Stanford as an undergraduate has met regularly for more than 20 years. And its members, several of them now well-known novelists like Zhang and Karin Mahajan, are warmly acknowledged at the back of rejection. Elbowing my way through the ebullient scrum of partygoers, I was struck by the fact that all these people were connected by a man who self-identified as a bullied nerd and claimed

to rarely leave his apartment, where he spends hours, sometimes days at a time, playing video games. To them he was a beloved mentor, a force of nature, a very special person, and the opposite of a prude, who made them feel they could say or write just about anything, no matter how weird. They praised his generosity and insight, the sense of community he fostered, and also his powerful singing voice. The book swaps are usually held at his apartment and end with karaoke.

That semester, Tulutamuti had complained to his students that he had no idea how to dress himself. Toward the end of the evening, in a teasing gesture of affection, several of them gave him a white Balenciaga t-shirt, which he obligingly pulled on, the tag dangling down his back. It was several sizes too large, but he smiled broadly all the same. Shouting over the dinner voices, his friend the novelist Kevin Wynn told me, He tweets like an insane person, he writes like a genius, but I think he's most proud of this community he's built. You can hear a story from Tony Tulottamuti's new book Rejection in the Times Audio app.