Private Citizens is a 2016 debut novel by Tony Tulathimutte, published by William Morrow and Company. It follows four graduates from Stanford University—Cory, Henrik, Linda, and Will—as they struggle toward their personal fulfillment and professional goals in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2000s. Critics have considered the book to be a Great American Novel or one of the first great millennial novels. In 2017, Tulathimutte won a Whiting Award in fiction for the book.
Synopsis Set in San Francisco right before the Great Recession, the novel follows four characters freshly graduated out of Stanford University as they proceed and struggle along their respective career and life paths. Cory takes up leadership at a progressive nonprofit organization and sometimes struggles with liberal guilt; Linda is a writer who has a run-in with drugs and a car crash; Henrik is Linda's ex and a scientist whose graduate studies are turbulent due to chronic underfunding in academia; and Will is a software engineer who amasses lots of money and capital but faces difficulty with regard to his Asian American identity and eventually loses himself in the gravity of his girlfriend, a startup founder named Vanya.
Background
Stanford and Silicon Valley Tulathimutte attended Stanford University, where he started writing in his freshman year. There, he had written pandering pieces about white people while not yet having any interest in writing about Asian Americans; some of them were successful, ultimately winning Tulathimutte some of his first awards, including an O. Henry Award, which was an outcome which he called "enormously destructive ... it ended up reinforcing the feeling that if I gave people what they wanted, then I'd get acknowledge as a worthwhile individual". After graduating, Tulathimutte worked in Silicon Valley as a UX researcher for a few years. Not satisfied with his career choice, he ended up attending the Iowa Writers' Workshop and moved to New York City. Through his twenties, Tulathimutte had felt "a crude, formless angst over not having accomplished anything I was particularly proud of, nothing that I thought represented me in any way", after which the abandoned the ethos "that really good fiction required writing about people and experiences as different from yours as possible" and endeavored to write about his years at Stanford and in San Francisco.
Writing the novel Before starting on Private Citizens, Tulathimutte had written a short story collection that he didn't want to publish as well as a novel that ended up amounting to a novella. Two years passed, during which he didn't write any new material. One day, however, Tulathimutte wrote a 40-page short story "about people day-tripping to the beach, similar to a trip I’d taken a couple of years earlier. I’d remembered thinking very vividly on that trip, why do I feel so anxious, why is it so hard to enjoy this?" The short story originally concerned Tulathimutte's original articulation of the character Linda, after which he believed it needed to bring cognitive depth to the other characters at the beach too in order for something to click. He later workshopped it during his attendance of the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 2008, a time when "Every attempt at writing about people my age up to that point had always struck me as frivolous and self-indulgent". With encouragement from a friend, Karan Mahajan, Tulathimutte decided, "okay, I’m just gonna sketch these four different characters and give them each a scenario. This wound up as the prologue of the novel, in a condensed form." Originally, the book was titled Being Right. In the Rumpus, Tulathimutte said that the whole book "wasn't plotted at all" and "was written in the stupidest way possible, which was all at once ... I had ideas for thoughts, characters, individual sentences, and I wrote them down in a gigantic nebula of Word files." At most, he amassed "1,100 pages" of unorganized, unrevised material that he eventually pared down and tightened to slightly less than 400 pages. Amid critics comparing Tulathimutte to various authors including Jonathan Franzen, Tulathimutte himself called the book a "post-grad anomie" novel in the same literary lineage as books by Keith Gessen and Mary McCarthy.
Regarding the character of Will, Tulathimutte said he originally wanted him to be a tech bro who was white, with race serving as a "buffer" between Will's characterization and Tulathimutte's own reality as someone who formerly worked in Silicon Valley. However, Tulathimutte eventually realized he "had to cave and say, no, everything that gives context to his specific kind of resentment and indignation is that he’s an Asian guy. And that was the hardest thing." While Tulathimutte stated that he identifies with all four protagonists rather than just Will, he admitted that Will's biographical similarity to himself was a trick on critics."The difference with Will is that I didn't try to demurely abstract the character Will from myself, but to deliberately bait comparisons with him ... Since I knew I’d be identified with my Asian character anyway, I rigged it so that doing so would force critics to make blatantly racist surmises, to expose what we're dealing with. That is, if they’re going to try to essentialize my character’s Asianness, they’ll have to go through me."
Genre In Electric Literature, Tulathimutte pushed back against claims that he was writing a novel for the millennial generation or a Great American Novel, stating "That's just vanity. That's just you wanting to own everybody." He further stated that Linda's critique of male writers was intended "to expose my limitations." Ultimately, Tulathimutte said he was writing about "privileged mostly white people in San Francisco" due to his experiences growing up in a white town, going to a white school, attending a well-off institution like Stanford, and arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area "with these Mongol hordes of tech and finance people who followed the money." Tulathimutte also rebutted against claims of the novel being a satire given his personal proximity to the experiences of his protagonists as well as the realism of millennial experience captured.
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