Tony Tulathimutte

These days, it seems like it's a rite of passage to go through the just-graduated-and-I-have-no-idea-what-I'm-doing, trying to discern out who you really are and what you really want to do time, usually not too long after graduating from college. Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens is about that exact time in the lives of four people. Confused social activist Cory, insecure tech worker Will, unstable grad student Henrik and self-destructive wannabe writer Linda all knew each other at Stanford and live in and around tech-boom San Francisco, and the story follows each of them in turn as they try to figure out the obstacles in front of them: Cory's inheritance of a flailing nonprofit, Will's inability to cope with his hyperambitious, emotionally withholding girlfriend Vanya, Henrick's loss of funding for his research and recurrence of bipolar disorder, and Linda's drug issues and infatuation with her own perceived genius. They're not friends anymore, per se, more like people whose lives intertwined in college as roommates or in ill-fated relationships, and never came completely apart. And as their lives get more complicated and harder, they find themselves coming back together.

Both Tulathimutte's characterizations and grasp on the thorny knot it can be to be a millennial are strong and ring true. Cory and Will and Henrik and Linda all feel like real, if highly magnified, people. None of them are especially likable, but all of them can be sympathetic. They're all experiencing the fuzzy mess of trying to check your privilege, of trying to find the right boundaries between your online life and your real one, figuring out your own niche in a crowded world, living up to the praise and expectations you've been inundated with for your whole life. It's trendy to dismiss millennial malaise as a bunch of whining from spoiled brats, but Tulathimutte understands that it isn't that simple. We were raised to believe that you earn a medal just for showing up, that you can be anything you want to be...and when it turns out that your life isn't particularly special, you can't shake the feeling that it's your fault, somehow, that you've failed yourself and wasted your potential. The writing is maybe a little heavy on esoteric word choices, but it's sharp and incisive and compelling. I'm not sure how I felt about the end, though...it felt like a bit of a departure from the rest of the book, at least in part. But maybe when I read it again (and I plan to), knowing how it winds up, it'll fit more cohesively.… (altro)

between the masterful discussion of internet pornography/its consumption in this book and his work in "the feminist," incel studies departments of the future will be indebted to tulathimutte for decades, if not centuries -- this isn't "The Definitive Work Of Internet Fiction" but this could very, very conceivably be the person who writes it, provided tony's 2007 /gif/ tripcode isn't leaked before his next novel's NYT review is released

the rest of the book is a reasonably competent first novel by an MFA graduate with its requisite litany of quasi-developed ideas about postgraduate drift -- so, definitely read the work i discussed above and give the dude a follow, as i 100% believe there are great things yet to come. re: the rest of this book? idk you could read it if you wanted to but imho describing tech-adjacent 2010's culture is simultaneously too cartoonish and too strict in its realism to ever feel wholly satisfying in fiction -- you know the feeling you get when you see lisa simpson hold an iphone? it can't ever be "wrong" and it can't ever be "right"… (altro)

NO. Nope nope nope. I really wanted to like it. NYMag even touted it as the "First Great Millenial Novel" which, for as terrible a reputation that we as millenials have, I thought was still worthy of excitement. Maybe it would offer insight into why millenials seem worthy of antagonization, or more importantly, prove that we are really a lot like every generation that came before us.

The good part is that the four so-called millenials in this novel are not the reason to dislike it. They are, in general, selfish and unlikable but multifaceted in a way that may have been served with more skillful and focused narrative and writing. Did it challenge the way we are to view millenials? Absolutely not. It didn't NEED to, but it would have been nice for some analysis and synthesis regarding the four main characters. Two out of four of them go through a major change of character before the novel's end but unfortunately it felt unearned.

Here's my real issue, and I rarely feel this way: it honestly seemed as if Tulathimutte had his laptop in front of him and his thesaurus in his lap. I was looking up roughly 2-4 words per page, most of them so super specific that it was hard to justify the usage. At first, I thought that the style of writing was only specific to Linda, the hyper-literate ultra-defensive trouble addict. Then I noticed it had crept into all the other character's sections. Turns out that it's not just Linda who's yearning to be known as hyper-literate: It's Tulathimutte. He's proved it, just at the cost of the readability of his novel.

… (altro)