“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,
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,
is as expansively intelligent as it is full of heart.