Private Citizens: A Novel
3/5
()
Currently unavailable
Currently unavailable
About this ebook
“Scathing, upsetting and generous all at once, this novel, about millennial friends in pre-2008-crash San Francisco, thrums with Tulathimutte’s sly intelligence and unerring comic timing. . . . The warm flashes make the satire cut deeper.” —The New York Times, “The Funniest Novels Since Catch-22”
"One of the really phenomenal novels I've read in the last decade." —Jonathan Franzen
From a brilliant new literary talent comes a sweeping comic portrait of privilege, ambition, and friendship in millennial San Francisco. With the social acuity of Adelle Waldman and the murderous wit of Martin Amis, Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens is a brainy, irreverent debut—This Side of Paradise for a new era.
Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century: call it a loving satire. A gleefully rude comedy of manners. Middlemarch for Millennials. The novel's four whip-smart narrators—idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda—are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, the four estranged friends stagger through the Bay Area’s maze of tech startups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other’s lives once again.
A wise and searching depiction of a generation grappling with privilege and finding grace in failure, Private Citizens is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.
Tony Tulathimutte
Tony Tulathimutte is the author of Private Citizens and Rejection. His work has appeared in The Paris Review, n +1, The Nation, The New Republic, and The New York Times. The recipient of an O. Henry Award and a Whiting Award, he runs the writing class CRIT in Brooklyn.
Related to Private Citizens
Related ebooks
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Twist: An American Girl Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Captain Lands in Paradise Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Love Song of Jonny Valentine: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rail Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Hot Pink Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Getting It In The Head Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Mandela Plot: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Spectacle of the Body Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Anthologist: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5What begins with bird Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHappiness: Ten Years of n+1 Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5What the World Will Look Like When All the Water Leaves Us Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Some Girls Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Devil's Treasure Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Bill from My Father: A Memoir Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Instructions Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Paul on Mazursky Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5If You Lived Here You'd Be Famous by Now: True Stories from Calabasas Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5A Fortunate Age: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I Am God: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Revisionaries Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsI Like Being Killed: Stories Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Lie About the Truck: Survivor, Reality TV, and the Endless Gaze Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In All Things: A Return to the Drooling Ward Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Vanishing: Five Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Story of My Life: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Literary Fiction For You
The Handmaid's Tale Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Flowers for Algernon Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Demon Copperhead: A Pulitzer Prize Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Tattooist of Auschwitz: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Little Birds: Erotica Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5All the Ugly and Wonderful Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I'm Thinking of Ending Things: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Ocean at the End of the Lane: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Annihilation: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Who Have Never Known Men Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Covenant of Water (Oprah's Book Club) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5East of Eden (Original Classic Edition) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Silmarillion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tender Is the Flesh Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Old Man and the Sea: The Hemingway Library Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Queen's Gambit Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Catch-22: 50th Anniversary Edition Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Only Woman in the Room: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Confederacy of Dunces Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Piranesi Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Pride and Prejudice: Bestsellers and famous Books Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Salvage the Bones: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Farewell to Arms Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Private Citizens
30 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This book was chosen because it had good reviews and being older I like to delve into millennial's lives. This book loosely follows 4 Stanford students that came together in college and are now out in the hyper Bay Area. The writer is very creative and shows great knowledge but the book has way too many long narratives that show the writer's skill but add nothing to the book. Editing would have greatly helped. The characters seem caricatures unless there are really people like this. They were not very likable which is not a problem but it did make the book less interesting. They were definitely into themselves. I am really not clear why this book was so well received but it didn't work for me.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5These days, it seems like it's a rite of passage to go through the just-graduated-and-I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-doing, trying to discern out who you really are and what you really want to do time, usually not too long after graduating from college. Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens is about that exact time in the lives of four people. Confused social activist Cory, insecure tech worker Will, unstable grad student Henrik and self-destructive wannabe writer Linda all knew each other at Stanford and live in and around tech-boom San Francisco, and the story follows each of them in turn as they try to figure out the obstacles in front of them: Cory's inheritance of a flailing nonprofit, Will's inability to cope with his hyperambitious, emotionally withholding girlfriend Vanya, Henrick's loss of funding for his research and recurrence of bipolar disorder, and Linda's drug issues and infatuation with her own perceived genius. They're not friends anymore, per se, more like people whose lives intertwined in college as roommates or in ill-fated relationships, and never came completely apart. And as their lives get more complicated and harder, they find themselves coming back together.Both Tulathimutte's characterizations and grasp on the thorny knot it can be to be a millennial are strong and ring true. Cory and Will and Henrik and Linda all feel like real, if highly magnified, people. None of them are especially likable, but all of them can be sympathetic. They're all experiencing the fuzzy mess of trying to check your privilege, of trying to find the right boundaries between your online life and your real one, figuring out your own niche in a crowded world, living up to the praise and expectations you've been inundated with for your whole life. It's trendy to dismiss millennial malaise as a bunch of whining from spoiled brats, but Tulathimutte understands that it isn't that simple. We were raised to believe that you earn a medal just for showing up, that you can be anything you want to be...and when it turns out that your life isn't particularly special, you can't shake the feeling that it's your fault, somehow, that you've failed yourself and wasted your potential. The writing is maybe a little heavy on esoteric word choices, but it's sharp and incisive and compelling. I'm not sure how I felt about the end, though...it felt like a bit of a departure from the rest of the book, at least in part. But maybe when I read it again (and I plan to), knowing how it winds up, it'll fit more cohesively.