The Mutual Friend: A Novel

"Carter Bays is best known for the long-running sitcom “How I Met Your Mother.” His debut novel The Mutual Friend is like a sophisticated literary version, centering on a New York City-based ensemble with plenty to say about the discontents of modern life and the difficulty of connection. In a sometimes frenzied satirical style, it presents a conflagration of cringe, as Bays paints a slightly heightened and terrifying vision of life in our age of distraction. More than anything else, though, the nearly 500-page novel explores people bumping into one another and deciding if they have what it takes to make it stick."