[1] 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.

[2] 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.

[4] 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.

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.

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.

Malhotra then said that Tulathimutte's choice of "social milieu" among his protagonists provided fertile ground for satire but "At times, the novel becomes relentlessly discursive, which, after several pages, can feel suffocating, the characters’ torrent of language—theorizing, self-narrating, postulating—trapping them, and, consequently, us, in their fraught millennial minds."

Gonzales also appreciated how Tulathimutte made his characters not merely laughingstocks but full, complex human beings whom readers could simultaneously laugh at and feel for.

[12] Similarly, Sathnam Sanghera wrote in a brief recommendation for the New York Times that "Mr. Tulathimutte is keen to probe the underlying anxieties and insecurities of his characters, making them more empathetic and appealing than they might have been.

"[13] Brett Beach, in the Masters Review, called Tulathimutte's debut "superb" and likened its empathetic, incisive perspective to Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie with a tone akin to Philip Roth and an ambition matching that of Jonathan Franzen.

[17][18] The Herald, however, saw the book as less of a satire and more of a social novel; the reviewer commended Tulathimutte's comfort in his 2000s setting of choice and said "He uses Private Citizens like a particle accelerator, encouraging elements of contemporary culture to clash into one another and examining the effects of the fallout on his deeply flawed characters."

The reviewer also stated that Tulathimutte's characters additionally achieved a sense of humanity, toward which readers could empathize, rather than merely serving as props or objects in his discursive experiment of modern culture.