By After reading Tony Tulathimutte’s short story collection Rejection I knew that I had found a new favorite contemporary author. And picking up his novel, Private Citizens, next, did not disappoint.
About the Book
Title: Private Citizens
Author: Tony Tulathimutte
Published: 2016
Genre: fiction, literary fiction
My Rating: 5/5 stars
The Premise
Synopsis (from Goodreads):
“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.”
My Thoughts
I am a sucker for self-aware satirical writing about screwed up people. It’s why I like Bret Easton Ellis, Bojack Horseman , Ottessa Moshfegh, etc. etc. It is even better when the content is stuff I encounter every day.
Though this book is supposed to be primarily about millenials, it felt thoroughly relevant even to someone 20 years younger. I definitely know people like these people. The four main characters are all frustrating in their own way, each exemplifying a type of cultural neurosis and San Francisco cliche. There is Linda, couch-surfing and getting high while manipulating everyone around her and constantly lording her literary superiority over everyone else. Cory, saddled with managing a flailing nonprofit and being a good progressive while dealing with her larger-than-life roommate, Roopa, a sex worker who dumpster-dives for organic food. Henrik, dealing with the loss of funding for his graduate school project and a relapse into his bipolar. And Will, who’s perpetually dragged along at the whims of his ambitious girlfriend, who has girlbossed her way into a major startup, putting their relationship to the test.
Linda, Cory, Henrik and Will were a friend group during their undergraduate years at Stanford, and through a series of coincidences and unlikely social crossovers post-grad, they find themselves reconnecting, often leading to destructive results. Like Rejection, Private Citizens explores themes of performative intellectualism, privilege, intersectionality, social justice, sexuality, and interpersonal relationship dynamics through biting satire. Some might even accuse it of being mean-spirited, but isn’t that the best of satire?
“‘The Internet is a vile, omnivorous privatization machine. A technological vector of capitalist domination. Heidegger.’ ‘Yo, you don’t win arguments by saying “Heidegger.“‘”
The over-the-top antics and situations that the characters find themselves in throughout Private Citizens made it compulsively readable, and on a sentence level, gosh this book was brilliant. The writing was extremely clever and erudite (which seems to have annoyed some people, but I liked it a lot).
Honestly, I was left with a strong desire to write something inspired by the myriad characters I’ve known in college. You can probably picture some of them if I divulge I was in the philosophy club. (None of the especially pathological characters follow me on here, last I checked)
Everything here was appallingly what it seemed. Her fellow undergrads were all careerist dickheads, thumb-sucking vegans, smug libertarians, batshit Republicans, pompous student-visa techies, precious study-abroad fuzzies, Division I Neanderthals, faculty lapdogs, marching band weenies recouping their squandered adolescences, and the unforgivably rich. Everyone seemed so well parented; everyone’s semantic web architecture or microlending nonprofit or carbon nanotube dildo was going to change the world.
And honestly, Cory has a special place in my heart. She is just like me fr fr. I could not even be angry with her.
“She itched and felt afraid, but it didn’t matter. What difference did the existence of one frightened heart make on the scale of calamity? The optimistic forecasts gave us fifty years until the seas rose, then drought, mass displacement, resource wars. It was perverse: You wanted scientific consensus to be wrong about the ice core data, the carbon bomb in the permafrost, the declining albedo. You prayed that the delusional idiots were right. But the only comfort was that they’d suffer too.”
Have you read Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte? If so, what did you think of it? Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments below!
If you liked this post, consider subscribing to Frappes & Fiction. I post about the books I read (even if they’re not fiction), the books I think YOU should read, and anything else on my mind.
Frappes and Fiction 