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Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
This much-hyped debut about four Stanford graduates making their way in noughties San Francisco may be on the long side, but that's where the similarity ends The unwanted declaration of love. The friend who decides to honestly reveal what they always thought of your baby's nose. Sometimes it only takes one line to kill a relationship. For some reason, the publisher of Private Citizens invites us on the flyleaf to "Call it ... Middlemarch for millennials". And what could have been a pleasant encounter between reader and slab of near-contemporary realism is suddenly dead, murdered by incompatible expectations. Every page of this debut is haunted by the unflattering question: "Is this what a Middlemarch for millennials would do?" In the pro column: it's on the long side, with liberal use of free indirect discourse, some philosophical digressions, and erudite quotes to head up each chapter (one of which is taken from Middlemarch, suggesting that the comparison has not been imposed unbidden). It's also set around a critical moment in technology from recent history, with the burgeoning internet of 2007-8 in place of the railways bearing down on Middlemarch. In the con column: this is not a study of life in a provincial town, because it's set in San Francisco; and it doesn't have the roaming, rangy sympathies of Eliot. Where Middlemarch achieved understanding for even its most flawed characters, no one in Private Citizens rises above the level of detestable. All four core members of the central ensemble, in fact, make faking your own death feel like a preferable alternative to hanging out. Thrown together at Stanford and now negotiating adulthood, they are: Will, an Asian-American web 2.0 wunderkind stricken by racism and his own pathetic worship of hot women; Cory, Jewish, a do-gooder and self-destroyer working at a non-profit; Henrik, a heavily medicated perma-student with an unworldly bent. And then there's Linda, the manic pixie dreamgirl who knows she's a manic pixie dreamgirl, because she's a painfully self-aware writer -- or at least she would be a writer if she weren't so busy ministering to her internalised misogyny with drugs and booze and sex. Linda's is the first voice we hear in the novel, and it's through her that Tulathimutte does most of the heavy thinking. There are no grand digressions by the narrator in the manner of Middlemarch 's great pier-glass passage, because as Tulathimutte has Linda say: "Contemporary authors were so shit-scared of moralising that they delegated to their poor characters the responsibility for conveying their philosophies through indirect discourse." Later on, belatedly discovering The Wire, Linda reflects on the way evolving media is eroding fiction's province: the prestige HBO drama has "killed the social novel, that sad oxymoron", she thinks. "Then you go online and read the public affirmations of the First World. At last the mass can sing of the mass. What writing can survive? The inverse in verse, the antisocial novel?" Given that she has these weighty platitudes to mouth, it's hard not to sympathise with Linda when she says: "I have real pity for fictional characters, the clueless dupes of dramatic irony -- especially the female creations of male novelists." But it's also very hard to enjoy such limited observations from such a limited character. It's all very well to recognise that fictions are subordinated to their authors, and that the intricate triple-decker might be redundant in the age of lifecasting (one of the typically 2000s things that Private Citizens ' characters get involved in), but describing the limits of your work does not automatically make it more insightful or interesting. Maybe if Tulathimutte had allowed himself to play the classic realist narrator, his characters could have enjoyed a little more space to act. Instead, they are cramped and inert. Very little happens to or is done by them for most of the book, and the flimsy threads of plot run alongside each other rather than intersecting -- Linda might complain that San Francisco is "too small to churn away consequence", but that's not the impression given by the parallel lives of her and her friends. There's incident, but not much import. In the absence of complex characters, Private Citizens is less Middlemarch and more I Love the 00s What results is a time capsule rather than a novel. Private Citizens repeatedly spins you out of the fiction to check when smartphones became ubiquitous, or at what time the word "cishet" might plausibly have appeared in the vocabulary of the right-on, or when describing oneself as a "ronin" or "ninja" became a tedious habit in the creative industries. Tulathimutte reliably gets these details right, but details are all they are. They signify little more than nostalgia. In the absence of complex characters and a detailed social world, Private Citizens is less Middlemarch and more I Love the 00s. - Sarah Ditum.
New York Review of Books Review
At first, Tulathimutte's debut novel seems to have been written solely to make the reader laugh at the characters, not with them. The book follows four millennials - a demographic already treated as a national punch line - as they leave Stanford to make their way in a world immune to how special they think they are. They are met with disaster and opportunity, moments in which to shine or to suffer ridiculously humiliating failures. The setup is practically foolproof, but that shouldn't discount Tulathimutte's talent for comedy. A funny situation doesn't always lead to funny writing, and Tulathimutte frequently proves his ability to nurse laughs even from dire, awkward, uncomfortable situations, not just from explicitly amusing ones. Tulathimutte's niftiest feat, though, is his ability to subtly shift the reader's laughter from the kind engendered by a sense of superiority to the kind built on recognition. He imbues his characters with flaws - spite, self-doubt projected meanly outward, lazy thinking, jealousy and the soft desire to see your friends fail, or at least not to succeed before you do - but he tempers these with humanity and small moments of grace, true friendship and concern for others. At times, Tulathimutte overextends the joke: One character claims not to have an email address, which seems far-fetched for this generation. And he can take too much pleasure in ridiculing millennials, Internet trolls and even people sincere in their efforts at self-improvement. Then again, it's a comedy - and one that is, in all respects, emotionally engaging and more than satisfying. MANUEL GONZALES'S new novel is "The Regional Office Is Under Attack!"