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.” A very online author of very online fiction, Tulathimutte 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 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.

“The Feminist,” to be fair, contains more than a gust of heterodoxy; the story, which appeared in n+1, 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 MacKinnon and Dworkin and Firestone and Faludi and Winterson and Butler and Solanas and Schulman and hooks and Greer,” 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 harbor the very sorts of double standards feminism sought to eliminate, and indulge a narcissistic victim complex by which they tolerate and even seek out aggro misogyny in their romantic partners, while relying on men of conscience” — i.e., men like him — “to handle the emotional scutwork.” Then he dons a mask, enters a restaurant and guns down the patrons in cold blood.

Tulathimutte, 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, Tulathimutte’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-read piece of fiction in n+1’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, Tulathimutte was inundated by emails and direct messages. Strangers started approaching him in public: Was he the Tony who wrote that story?