Private Citizens

November 30, 2015
It’s not easy being a Millennial, especially not in Tulathimutte’s debut, which traces the rising and falling fortunes of four recent Stanford grads just before the 2008 financial crisis. Cory finds herself unexpectedly at the helm of a Bay Area nonprofit that is as much about assuaging liberal guilt (perhaps especially her own) as it is about fostering genuine change. Linda and Henrik are still recovering—in their own unique and thoroughly imperfect ways—from their failed love affair, which in many ways defined their college years. And then there’s Will, whose virginity has finally been ended by his beautiful girlfriend, Vanya, whose desire for Internet fame may be getting in the way of their relationship. All four of them grapple with the gaps between their early promise and their current less-than-shining realities, and between their individual forms of privilege and the struggles of those around them. The novel’s structurally more formal first half is also the more successful; each of its lengthy chapters focuses on one of the four characters and reads almost like a well-developed short story. When their paths begin to cross again in the novel’s second half, the plots become more enmeshed but less satisfying. Nevertheless, Tulathimutte exhibits a talent for satire, and a willingness to embrace brutal reality and outright absurdity.

Starred review from November 1, 2015
Tulathimutte's razor-sharp debut tracks a group of recent Stanford grads anxiously navigating post-college life in mid-2000s San Francisco. The two years since Steve Jobs gave their commencement address have not been particularly kind to Tulathimutte's struggling millennials. Not to Cory, a self-righteous bleeding heart, who found herself at the helm of a comically flailing progressive nonprofit; not to Linda, potentially brilliant and tremendously mean, who's traded in her literary ambitions for a kind of drug-induced free fall; and not to her college boyfriend, Henrik, a scientist with bipolar disorder whose graduate funding has just been unceremoniously cut. On the surface, things seem to be going slightly better for Will, a coder with an endless stream of Silicon Valley cash and an out-of-his-league girlfriend ("It was easy to imagine another twenty-four years passing before he met a girl of Vanya's caliber"), but in reality, he's at least as unmoored as the rest of them. He's struggling with his Asian identity--even being smart adheres to stereotype, he realizes--and while he's clinging to the relationship (thus the $20,000 engagement ring, so far unaccepted), he has to admit the whole enterprise has started to feel a bit "like paying the upkeep on a prize Lamborghini." Weaving their stories together, Tulathimutte follows the quartet through the post-apocalyptic landscape of post-collegiate angst. But as their lives spiral steadily out of control--Will becomes enmeshed in Vanya's venture capital-backed "lifecasting" startup, to catastrophic results; Linda is hit by a car--the characters become more than caustic millennial punch lines: they become human. Witty, unsparing, and unsettlingly precise, Tulathimutte empathizes with his subjects even as he (brilliantly) skewers them. A satirical portrait of privilege and disappointment with striking emotional depth.

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November 15, 2015
Several recent Stanford graduates navigate their first post-college years in San Francisco with all the aimlessness that typifies the millennial generation. Linda, a would-be writer, turns pariah, apartment crashing for a year with whomever she happens to be sleeping with. Henrik is kicked out of his biomedical engineering graduate program. Cory joins the hamster wheel of nonprofits, struggling to take charge of a grassroots fundraiser. Will, a techie in Silicon Valley, helps his overbearing, handicapped girlfriend launch her reality TV show. Overeducated, underemployed, full of apathy, pain, and drugs, Tulathimutte's eccentric characters menace each other, self-sabotoge (three characters wind up in the hospital), and finally, in a way, come to terms. Tulathimutte's debut is poetic and verbose as his characters sardonically and intellectually upend every contemporary topic presented to themconsumer complicity, white guilt, joblessness, activism, sex, instant gratification in the digital age, and even hygiene: absolute clean was another class of filth. Though their dysfunction is gratingly relentless, Private Citizens is an impressive start for an edgy new writer.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)