An irony of this age, when everyone is connected to everyone else, is that loneliness proliferates. Martin Luther’s claim that a lonely man ‘always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst’ is exemplified by the miserable spiralling of fervidly online isolates. This is the world of Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection.

The US writer’s much-hyped second book (his advance was US$350,000) cements Tulathimutte’s status as a leading chronicler of a particular type of millennial malaise. He pops the zits of the Zeitgeist, probes and provokes, parading the fecklessness of his neurotic, narcissistic characters for our approbation, then turns the tables and makes us, his readers, the patsies. It is dazzling, a lot of the time. It is also profane, brutal, bewildering, depressing.