Bays, the cocreator of the television show How I Met Your Mother, debuts with an unwieldy story involving a bunch of people whose lives occasionally intersect in New York City. Tech millionaire Bill Quick, developer of an app called MeWantThat, finds meaning in Buddhism, while his wife, Marianne, spends her time shopping for the perfect piece of high-priced real estate. Bill's adopted sister, Alice--currently a nanny with aspirations to become a doctor--navigates the treacherous shoals of online dating. Generally, everyone is always on their phones, delivering an unsubtle message about the characters' disconnection from real life. The bare-bones plot revolves primarily around Alice's attempts to achieve her goals, and sprinkled in are light moments stemming from the comic value of characters such as the elderly, dick-pic-sending New York City mayor Spiderman (pronounced Speedermin), and of a dating app called Suitoronomy. But while Bays's prose has a distinct flair, he tends to ramble, with the style haltingly alternating between pages-long run-on sentences and blocks of paragraphs with nothing but ellipses. Despite a few good gags, this doesn't add up to much. (June)Correction: In an earlier version of this review, a character and a dating app were incorrectly described, and the mayor character was misnamed.

Bays' debut explores a spectrum of connections (and disconnections) between a group of New York City millennials, including Alice, whose quest to leave the world of nannying behind to become a doctor fuels an imaginatively tender and uncannily exact tale of life on the internet. While the world of New York City twentysomethings is a well-trod premise (as in the TV show How I Met Your Mother, of which Bays is a cocreator), The Mutual Friend is vast in scope, startling in its precise capture of the reality of intertwined digital lives, and satisfies its ambition with an unexpected humanity and vulnerability. The reader is regaled with many humorous yet believable twenty-first-century scenarios like searching for romance on dating apps, navigating the world of "tech bros," or walking into a pole owing to too much focus on a smartphone, all described with palpable tenderness and introspection. The semiomniscient narrator details vignettes that range from warm and charming moments between friends to jarringly accurate depictions of life online. Bays explores millennialism through a lens that is equal parts realistic and larger than life, deftly parsing through the many ways our digital lives create ripples through our real ones.

Several New Yorkers struggle to put down their phones in this debut comic novel. There's an abundance of characters in Bays' novel, and almost none of them know what they want. There's Alice, a 28-year-old nanny who thinks she wants to go to medical school but takes forever to register for the MCAT. There's her new roommate, Roxy, a 34-year-old Manic Pixie flibbertigibbet with a City Hall job whose desires are even more amorphous: "Roxy wanted what she wanted to want, nothing more, nothing less." Alice's brother, Bill, is at loose ends after leaving MeWantThat, the shopping app he founded; he takes a sudden interest in Buddhism, which is met with skepticism by his wife, Pitterpat, who "made an activity of wanting" but also seems to realize that the tony real estate she covets won't fill the emptiness inside her. The lives of the four characters (and several more, who move in and out of the novel) are all thrown into disarray when Roxy becomes embroiled in a scandal that transfixes the internet, Pitterpat gets diagnosed with Crohn's disease, and Bill impulsively makes a sudden, drastic life change. Throughout the novel, the characters wrestle with their addictions to their smartphones and social media: "Something's happened to my brain," Alice laments. "I don't know what it is. But I think it has to do with this phone I can't stop looking at every thirty fucking seconds." Bays was a co-creator of the sitcom How I Met Your Mother, so it's no surprise his novel is highly comic--sometimes darkly so. (The characters watch a reality show called Love on the Ugly Side, one episode of which forces the contestants to watch "deepfake videos of their parents having sex in order to win a couple's massage.") What is surprising is how beautifully written it is and how deftly the author balances humor and heartbreak. Bays writes with real compassion that never turns sentimental, and the structure of the book, told from the point of view of a mysterious omniscient narrator, is ingenious. This is a rare thing: an original, intelligent novel that's not just a perfect summer beach read, but one that deserves serious awards consideration as well. Put down your phone and pick it up. A major accomplishment. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.