Reading Kiley Reid’s fiction feels a bit like watching a prestige TV series. There are expansive casts of characters, many of whom happen to be good-looking. The plots are pacy and compelling, motored by flashbacks and cliffhangers and twists, while also dealing with social issues – particularly race and class – that add intellectual heft. Dialogue is hyper-realistic, often written out phonetically (“Ohmygod” is a favourite) so that you can hear it aloud in your head. No wonder the screen rights for Reid’s debut novel, the Booker-longlisted Such a Fun Age, were snapped up before it hit the shelves in 2019. It will be a surprise if her sophomore effort, Come and Get It, doesn’t soon land a similar deal.
In Such a Fun Age, Reid explored the fraught relationship between a babysitter, Emira, and her employer, Alix. Chapters alternated between their perspectives as the two characters processed the fallout from an incident in a food store in Philadelphia where Emira, a Black woman, was accused of kidnapping Alix’s white daughter. In Come and Get It, Reid widens her scope: now there are three central characters whose lives intersect, personally and professionally, on the campus of the University of Arkansas. Agatha Paul is a writer in her late 30s who is appointed visiting professor for the 2017-18 academic year; Millie Cousins is a student living and working as a resident assistant on a campus dorm, supporting the other young people; Kennedy Washburn is a new student on Millie’s dorm.
At the start of the autumn term, Agatha hires Millie to help recruit students to interview for a book project. The plan is to talk to them about weddings, although Agatha’s interest quickly shifts to the broader topic of money and how young women think about it. Kennedy, meanwhile, is roommates with one of the interviewees – but it transpires she is also a big fan of Agatha’s break-out book, a study of grief and mourning. “It had been gifted to her only eight months ago,” Reid writes, “and yet the pages were impressively worn.” You get the sense Kennedy has a personal investment in the subject. She’s depressed and struggling to make friends, and seems to have developed a hoarding problem. The others have a lot going on, too: Agatha has just broken up with her long-term girlfriend and Millie is grappling with her post-graduation prospects.
As their stories unfold, the dynamics between characters grow increasingly charged with tensions stemming from differences in power and identity. Agatha, for instance, is rich and white, while Millie – one of the few Black students in the dorm – is in need of cash. But a more subtly interesting aspect of Come and Get It is the use of eavesdropping, that classic narrative technique for revealing secrets and gossip, to draw together the characters’ trajectories. When Teen Vogue asks Agatha to write a series spinning off from her student interviews, she realises she needs more material. Millie invites her to come and sit in her room on Thursday evenings, where Agatha can hear the conversations in the dorm and be “inspired”. What neither of them realises is that Kennedy, whose bedroom adjoins Millie’s, has her own ear pressed to the wall.
All this spying serves as good fodder for a sequence of sitcom-like pranks and hijinks; Reid is a talented comic writer. But it also raises deeper questions about how we view the lives of other people, as material for our own consumption. Are the attractions of books and TV so different from those of eavesdropping? In each case, we acquire an intimate knowledge of characters – real or not – that is one-way and driven, at least in part, by psychological curiosity. Agatha might be understood as a kind of surrogate for the reader: when she first meets her interviewees, who make a few outrageous and casually racist comments, she experiences a queasy mix of “intrigue and revulsion” – she knows she wouldn’t want to befriend these women but she has the urge to keep listening to them, by any means necessary. Over time, her attachment grows. Near the end of Come and Get It, when she overhears a scandalous piece of gossip, her eyes literally widen. “The feeling of being invested in their lives, it was thrilling and terrible,” Reid writes. The drama is just too juicy – how could anyone resist a binge?
• Come and Get It by Kiley Reid is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
