I liked him immediately for reasons not unrelated to why I love his writing, the pleasing feeling of regularly getting to ask yourself “Are people allowed to say things like that?” while in his company. I liked him even more when I learned that we share an active passion for karaoke, and even more than that when he hired a professional magician named Justin Sight to surprise and amaze us at his birthday party. (Justin made a reappearance at Tony’s launch party for Rejection in the East Village last month.)
I met with Tony recently at Rialto Grande, a Brooklyn bar which sits between our two neighborhoods, where we drank a number of happy hour Cosmopolitans, and where I wanted to ask how he had succeeded where so many, it appears to me, are failing; writing in a way that feels genuinely and persuasively contemporary without veering into the sort of reference-laden prose about the internet that I find not only inelegant but basically unreadable, not much more than a series of flash cards with buzz words on them which flare briefly in the brain and then disappear forever. I asked him about this, and whether he must strategize to avoid risking references becoming passe or redundant.
“At a certain extreme you get things like Mindy Kaling at the DNC saying of Nancy Pelosi, ‘She was Brat before Brat, she’s the Mother of Dragons,’ right? If you know the catchphrases of the day and you’re redeploying them, you will always get some sort of trained seal applause. Nobody’s more guilty of this than literary fiction writers. You can go to a reading and people are just so starved for humor there that you can just say: ‘Twitter.’ And then people laugh.”
How, then, to avoid this kind of pandering?
“If you want to write about the way that things are different now than they used to be, then you have to talk about how things are structured differently. But beneath that structure, a lot of the content is exactly the same as it has always been. The subject of rejection is really evergreen. The customs are different. Ghosting somebody or leaving somebody unread is new, but rejecting somebody by ignoring them or by failing to acknowledge them is something that’s always happening, right? The only thing that’s different is about which platform it’s occurring on.”