How Much Ugliness Can You Take?

On Tony Tulathimutte's 'Private Citizens'

I recently went to my local independent bookstore to look for Tony Tulathimutte’s Rejection, which was long-listed for 2024’s National Book Award and has caused almost as much of a stir as Miranda July’s All Fours. Alas, they were out of copies, so I put in an order, and I thought, while I wait, I’d love to tell you about Tulathimutte’s first novel, Private Citizens, which came out in 2016.

First, this book is not for everyone. (And I think Tulathimutte would admit to that, too.) But damn. It's so smart and brimming with dead-on observations of humans in general and flailing millennials in particular. (The universal is in the particular, as William Carlos Williams *probably* said.)

The book plays a fast-paced game of hot potato: dismiss this character (ouch!), root for her (ouch!), dismiss the author (ouch!), keep reading (ouch!), how much longer can I take (ouch!), wow, this is brilliant (ouch!).

Cringe-inducing ironizing abounds: "She felt better after scooping into her purse and poking her snowcapped fingertip into her nose a few times. The bitter nerve-killing slush, percolating to her throat, dislodged an idea: she’d go ‘homeless.’ Why not? It’d be hilarious.”

If you're into DFW but sometimes get exasperated by the digressions and endless look-at-me theatrics, Tulathimutte might work for you. (Although, that level of virtuosity is present here, too.) I once read that Tulathimutte winnowed Private Citizens from 600 pages down to 372, all without changing the plot or cutting scenes. Turns out maximalism can be concise.

In Tulathimutte’s lexical universe, “kitten” and “millimeter” are verbs, desperate kisses press against “the most unwilling face her lips had ever touched,” and one character wonders if masturbation could be a “solitary pursuit of the sublime.” Dorito grit stuck in the seams of a car seat becomes the subject of poetic flight. One character, Henrik, grows anxious about his cocktail of medication, as “his pecs were threatening to mammarize.”

The gist: Four friends, reluctantly reunited after graduating from Stanford a few years prior, flail about in their respective careers. Saddled in debt, they try desperately to live authentic, if less painfully self-conscious, lives. It is roughly 2007. They argue about eyelid surgery, whether or not yoga panders to the male gaze, and how The Wire “killed the social novel, that sad oxymoron.” Not much happens, but their lives and philosophies entangle, and neuroses abound.

Christian Lorentzen sums up the characters nicely in a review for Vulture:

There is Linda, a tattoo-sleeved hedonist in flight from writer’s block who weaves a semi-professional path through parties and sex dungeons, fueled and numbed by alcohol and various powders; Henrik, a burnt-out, laboratory-bound grad student with a secret history of manic-depressive breakdown; Will, an Asian-American freelance coder with a porn addiction almost as debilitating as his identity-based inferiority complex; and Cory, a dreadlocked, Jewish, queer-curious, and lonely liberal activist with an eating disorder and a habit of checking her privilege to the point of personal stasis.

Henrik and Will speak and think in computer jargon and very online shorthand, which might take some work for the luddites and The Offline of us. (Me.) Small-dose readings might be best: every other sentence demands some unpacking in order to comprehend the logic and/or tangle of irony, but the comedic rewards are plenty. Amidst all the angst and interiority, slapstick never tasted so good.

They all hit bottom by mid-book, and they’re forced to reckon with their delusions: ideals prove hifalutin, romances turn toxic. Henrik wakes up to realize he is actually better with other people — who would’ve thought?

Tulathimutte himself finds stock- and archetypal characters an insult to fiction’s propensity to evoke empathy. In an interview with The Atlantic, he says:

“I set out to write with as much love, empathy, hope, and imagination as hate, spite, pessimism, and self-indulgence. And so the book got written. I’m not saying unsavory characters automatically make for good writing; it’s just as easy to go the other way and make Bret Easton Ellis/Chuck Palahniuk shadow puppets (dark, flat, silly). The same usually goes for attempts to look intellectual, radical, manly, “brave” (in the sense of confessional), self-deprecating, hip; in each case, the project is branding, not art. I’m saying that to try to write your characters in such a way as to avoid or shape any comparisons to you, and worse, to call this empathy, is to forfeit the honesty that readers deserve in lieu of truth.”

In other words, radical honesty, not caricature, tests a reader’s empathy—and remains necessary for creating three-dimensional characters.

Back in 2018, I taught this novel as part of a class about sentence craft, and my class hated it. Tulathimutte’s attention to the ugliness of the characters repulsed them. The sentence-level concision proved too difficult, too clever, a sensation overload. They said it contained too much language, too much authorial navel-gazing, and not enough plot. I tried to get them to see that the density springs from voice, and the authorial voice—close-third-person—taps (yes, painfully) into the worries, self-consciousnesses, contradictions, and solipsism of this particular group—privileged, ivy-leagued, young. Which made me wonder aloud: do you not like the book, or do you not like these people? Are you having a hard time getting inside this language? Or are you having a hard time getting inside their minds? Do you think that’s part of the point? Do you think that, were you to meet one of these characters in real life, you would have compassion for them? Don’t you think we all have a sheen? Don’t you think we all curate and doll-up and costume ourselves every time we walk out the door? Do you think your inner life and private struggles are pretty?

Tulathimutte redeems the characters in as much as stubborn, privileged assholes can be redeemed. Even though they are manipulative and crass and self-righteous and self-pitying and perpetrators of misogyny and meticulous crafters of online personas and vapid and addicted and extremely afraid, they are also in the act of waking up.

Aren’t we all?

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Whether this is for you or not, I’ll leave you with a few out-of-context sentences to marvel at:

“Linda’s phone number was faintly legible on his upper lip, where she’d written it in a permanent-marker Fu Manchu.”

“Each morning they retook the highways, past ecru acres of level dry terrain, the nation’s breadbasket truly resembling different types of cracker in parallax motion—the biscotti cliffs, the matzah veld, the crouton steppe.”

“Her last gig had her smooshing her décolletage into a pleather dirndl while a guy named Escobar chauffeured her to dive bars, where she sold toys and candy from a tray strapped to her neck, soliciting tips from the tipsy.”

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Have you read Private Citizens or Rejection? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Please spread the love to your local libraries, independent booksellers if you can, or shop online at Bookshop. Thanks, as always, for reading.