Private Citizens: A Novel
A novel about Stanford graduates whose friendships and ambitions reveal the anxieties and absurdities of millennial life.
Work Information
Love, work, and class consciousness unwind in the conversations of young urban adults.
A group of young friends in the Bay Area stumbles through their own desires and failures. The satire is sharp, but the characters' loneliness still feels concrete.
Book Information
- Publisher
- William Morrow Paperbacks
- Published
- 2016-02-09
- Pages
- 384 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.49 x 2.18 x 20.32 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780062399106
- ISBN-10
- 0062399101
- Price
- 3691 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Genre Fiction/Coming of Age
“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 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.
Reviews
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Apr 13, 2021 · I was curious whether an almost-octogenarian could enjoy a "millennial novel." No problem there, I think, but I wanted it to be a masterpiece, since it had all the ingredients. But flaws stood out. Basics about the subject matter can be had elsewhere, but here I want to cut to the chase. Tulathimutte sets in motion a crowded agenda—not one protagonist but 4 (really 5, in fact); activates a sensorium of originally described sounds, smells, sights, textures; wonderful sentences that crackle with electricity and surprise with wit; an expansive vocabulary that recalls the phrase “drunk with language;” apercus and witty asides on various topics; but unfortunately plot twists that, for me, snapped under the strain. The author sets up an exhausting rhythm to sustain, but I think he jumps the shark in the last 100 pages or so with dramatic developments that beg plausibility, particularly with the Asian male character, Will. I'd been willing to suspend disbelief through most of the story but felt betrayed when the author took his constructs less seriously than I did, or didn't realize he was shifting gears. So at best the experience was uneven, with the author trying a bit too hard to turn this tableau, this group portrait, essentially, into a drama with a climax. The insistent use of sensuous descriptive verbs began to grate as well: I began to long for people to simply come into rooms, for cars to simply pull up and park, etc., and let me imagine my own particulars if I wanted. All that said, this was definitely a worthwhile read from an assiduous and gifted writer. So many critics have said that they look forward to his next, in part I suspect for the same reason I do: that he may stop trying so hard to show all his gifts at once, or organize them so that the landscape doesn’t feel quite so cluttered and, additionally, the genre so uncertain. He could be a much better writer than Pynchon or Foster Wallace or DeLillo, (admittedly they aren't gods to me) but that may require on his part a bit more judicious self-control. Maybe that’s asking an apple to be an orange, but we shall see.
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One time read.... Good. But won't be going back to it.
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If you like Douglas Coupland you'll like this. Simple as that. Some of the characterisation is a little OTT but the language is beautiful and it's a satisfying, modern take on Gen X and its ilk. It's worth noting it made several book of the year lists 2016, too.
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Both hilarious and dark.
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Excellent read. Slow and fast, at the same time.
Related Literary Awards
- Whiting Awards Edition 32 (2017) ・Winner