Private Citizens
Ratings2
Average rating3.5
15
Ratings2
Average rating3.5
PRIVATE CITIZENS was named a best book of the year by New York Magazine/Vulture, The New Yorker, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post, Nylon, Kirkus, Electric Literature and The Millions. An Amazon Best Book of the Month in the Literature & Fiction Category A Buzzfeed “Most Exciting” Book of 2016 A Flavorwire “Most Anticipated” Book of 2016 New York Magazine calls Private Citizens "the first great millennial novel." Emma Cline calls it "brilliant." 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.
Reviews with the most likes.
Never has a book made me so glad to have aged out of the neurotic ambitions and disappointments of my early 20s!
I loved reading this hopelessly self-aware, wonderfully erudite, and viciously satirical novel about a quartet of earnest, screw-up millennials. This book is wall to wall observations, asides and digressions on the nature of personal identity in a digital age. It's almost too clever by half and I had to re-read it immediately after finishing it to figure out how I'd been fooled into thinking it clever. It's like an MFA class ate a thesaurus and shit out this book.
Tulathimutte admits to being clever as a pre-emptive defence against potential arguments that he's being ironic but then cops to the fact that acknowledging that invalidates his prior defence against trying to be clever - all embedded in the text of the story itself. If that kind of stuff makes you want to throw the book across the room — and really explaining it all makes me want to do just that — which he's also already made note of too. See - intellectual stalemate. Tony Tulathimutte is smarter than I am and has already invalidated any argument I may have had for not giving this book a full 5 star rating despite an altogether on the nose ending.
I loved this book - individual results may vary.
