Private Citizens

Capturing the anxious, self-aware mood of young college grads in the aughts, Private Citizens embraces the contradictions of our new century - call it a loving satire, a gleefully rude comedy of manners, Middlemarch for millennials. The novel's four whip-smart narrators - idealistic Cory, Internet-lurking Will, awkward Henrik, and vicious Linda - are torn between fixing the world and cannibalizing it. In boisterous prose that ricochets between humor and pain, Private Citizens follows the four estranged friends as they stagger through the Bay Area's maze of tech start-ups, protestors, gentrifiers, karaoke bars, house parties, and cultish self-help seminars, washing up in each other's lives once again.