Come and Get It is Kiley Reid’s breathlessly anticipated follow-up to her 2020 Booker long-listed triumph Such a Fun Age, which was lauded as an essential and nuanced satire of white privilege, racial microaggressions and gender politics. Published just before the Black Lives Matter movement, it became a key work in the canon of educational literature being shared on Instagram at that time. It was a slam-dunk of a debut. Yet, those who loved the razor-sharp observations and biting depictions of casual stereotyping should approach Reid’s second offering with expectations firmly lowered.
In Come and Get It, Reid, who is currently an assistant professor at the University of Michigan, attempts to give the themes of class and money the same satirical treatment. Sadly, what begins with spark in the first couple of chapters fizzles out spectacularly and meanders weakly through nearly 400 pages. It’s a slow burn extinguished before it ever gets going.
Set at the University of Arkansas in 2017, Reid observes the issues of inherited wealth, ambition, sexuality, LGBTQ issues and race with a light touch, covering so much ground that she often skirts around topics that are gagging for further attention. The story is told through a roster of characters but our main interests are five women: Agatha, a 37 year-old a visiting professor and successful author who has recently broken up with her skint, financially-dependent dancer girlfriend; Millie, a 24 year-old Black student (a rarity at Arkansas) and a Resident Assistant (for the Brits, that is a trained senior who is paid to act as a mentor and first port of call for other students in their dorm); and Kennedy, Tyler and Peyton, three students sharing a dorm suite on the other side of the paper thin walls of Millie’s bedroom.
A moment of jeopardy is followed by an anti-climactic conclusion
Millie — disciplined, frugal and a bit of a square apart from the marijuana edibles she enjoys — dreams of buying the little rundown house she’s been caretaking in Fayetteville and saves her $250 monthly RA salary diligently. Newly single Agatha arrives at the university and enlists Millie’s help in arranging student interviews for a project she’s researching on weddings. But Agatha is shocked and bemused by the students’ approach to money (mostly their parents’ money) and comes to an arrangement with Millie. Agatha will pay her $40 a time if she can sit in her bedroom and earwig on the students in their dorm. She uses their quotes and lives for “money diaries” articles she flogs to Teen Vogue. The young women haven’t given their consent and both Agatha and Millie are clearly abusing their positions of power. That’s before they begin a clandestine relationship. But self-reflection is cursory and, in the end, there is little comeuppance for either.
The book goes on like this. A moment of jeopardy is followed by an anti-climactic conclusion before it finally shudders to its disappointing end. One of the students, Kennedy, appears to have an interesting backstory. She is a loner, shopaholic and obsessed with professor Agatha’s book on satellite grief and accidental death. What shame is she harbouring? Reid teases it for the majority of the book. I won’t spoil it but it’s dissatisfying.
At one point tensions arise between Millie and one of the students in the adjoining dorm, Tyler. They each play a prank on the other. Oh, is this about to get nasty, you’ll think? Nope. It all fizzles out feebly. Events do eventually come to something of a crescendo between Agatha, Millie and the students, but it’s unfulfilling and limp.
Reid can write — of that there is no doubt — and her observations are flawless. Just as with Such a Fun Age, her skill is the subtly with which she can skewer people, ideas, tropes. It’s a pity then that she was unable to make the characters in Come and Get It come alive. Flat, bland and unlikeable, it was hard to muster up an iota of interest in what might happen to them.
Come and Get It promises the world and delivers nothing. I struggled to finish it.
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid is published by Bloomsbury (£16.99)
