College has proved so reliable a setting for fiction that it’s even laid claim to its own literary genre. But what happens after the campus novel graduates? The transition out of college is a much sadder, much less circumscribed, and, despite classic treatments by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Mary McCarthy, much less popular novelistic subject than college itself. The following books tackle (or, in The Rules of Attraction and Privilege, are born of) postcollegiate malaise, each revealing the downside of what Amory Blaine termed “aristocratic egotism”—the darkest hour of the privileged youth.

Daniel