Private Citizens
TONY TULATHIMUTTE
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ONEWORLD, $19.99
Four millennials graduate from Stanford in the mid-noughties, and find the world isn't all Steve Jobs (who gave the graduation speech) said it would be. That's the premise of Tony Tulathimutte's Private Citizens, a whip-smart satire on a generation born into a perfect storm of privilege and disappointment. There's Cory, a vegetarian idealist who inherits a not-for-profit start-up with massive pragmatic issues. There's brilliant, vicious Linda, a literary type with a bright future behind her, and her college sweetheart Henrik, a bipolar scientist whose research grant's been denied. Programmer Will seems great on paper, but while he's rakish in cash in Silicon Valley, he nurses a crippling porn addiction, and can't seem to satisfy a demanding paraplegic paramour. Private Citizens is contemporary satire that bristles with energy and inventiveness, skewering the foibles of today's youth with surprising depth and sophistication.