When I began to read the author Tony Tulathimutte’s story “Ahegao” late last year, I did not expect to finish it in disbelieving horror. I rarely laugh or cry aloud at a work of fiction nowadays, my wizened adult heart immune to the sort of physical convulsions literature could cause when I was an adolescent. Yet there I was, howling like I was at a wrestling match instead of reading literary fiction in The Paris Review.
I may not have anticipated the physical reflexes, but I already knew he was the real deal. I had admired and enjoyed his 2016 debut novel Private Citizens, a funny and precise satirical novel about post collegiate millennials in the mid-2000s in San Francisco which was widely lauded including by the likes of Jonathan Franzen. It had struck me while reading Private Citizensthat Tulathimutte has the unusual and dextrous skill of combining virtuoso intelligence with a kind of humor so …