With Stanford degrees, plenty of drugs and alcohol, and a fragile sense of purpose, the four friends in Tony Tulathimutte's first novel, Private Citizens, struggle to succeed in early 21st-century San Francisco. A Stanford graduate himself, Tulathimutte is wise to the jargon, angst and self-centered preoccupations of these smart Silicon Valley millennials buzzing around the edges of adulthood. There's recently defunded post-doc scientist Henrik, who finds refuge with his generous friend Will, a "short Asian guy" with a vast digital porn collection and a fixation on the disabled entrepreneur and former teen pageant queen Vanya. Child of privilege and aspiring social-activist Cory is annoyed by her libertine former roommate Linda's seeming ease among San Francisco's underground--although would-be writer and transplanted New Yorker Linda has nothing nice to say about the City by the Bay: "This little ukulele-strumming cuddle party... was nothing but a collapsed soufflé of sex kitsch and performance readings, book clubs, writing workshops... [where] the little journals and bookstores were on a drip-feed of pledge drives, and the only thing to say about the McSweeney's tweehouse of interns was that they had nice packaging."
Tulathimutte transcends the easy potshots at millennial sanctimony to capture the sincerity of his protagonists' friendship, and their real desire and effort to be decent participants in an adult community. School's over, and it's time for them to be "private citizens" in a world they may not have made but which is all the world they have. He has put his hyper-critical generation under a magnifying glass and found compassion and generosity after all. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kan.