Kiley Reid emerged on the literary scene on the finish of 2019, when her debut novel Such a Enjoyable Age launched in a crescendo of buzz. The story of a Black babysitter accused of kidnapping her white cost, Such a Enjoyable Age was a breezy, effortlessly compelling learn, a juicy comedy of manners that additionally tackled tough problems with race and sophistication. It was a Reese’s Guide Membership choose, and Lena Waithe’s manufacturing firm purchased the movie and TV rights. Now, Reid has launched her second novel, Come and Get It.
Come and Get It channels the simple appeal of Such a Enjoyable Age, however it is a darker, extra bold challenge. It goals to withhold simple satisfactions, to frustrate, to sentence. It’s solely partially profitable.
As in Such a Enjoyable Age, the central relationship of Come and Get It is one between a rich middle-aged white lady and a younger Black lady she is paying for a service. Right here, the white lady is Agatha, a journalist with a classy capsule wardrobe and a protecting attachment to her seven-piece Wüsthof knife set. The Black lady is 24-year-old Millie, a university RA desperately hoarding cash so she will afford to place a down cost on a home as quickly as she graduates.
Agatha and Millie meet when Agatha strikes to the small Southern faculty city of Fayetteville, the place Millie goes to high school, to analysis her newest guide. It begins as a challenge on how younger Southern girls take into consideration weddings, however after Agatha develops a fascination with a clique of rich women speaking about their “enjoyable cash” and their “apply paychecks,” she redirects her guide into an account on how Southern faculty girls take into consideration cash.
Agatha first connects with Millie to facilitate interviews together with her residents. However after Millie, nursing a crush on Agatha, gives to assist her discreetly pay attention to dorm life conversations, their relationship takes a flip. Quickly, Agatha is spending her nights holed up in Millie’s dorm room, ear to the wall.
“If the scenario was in any respect inappropriate,” Agatha notes defensively, “Millie confirmed no indicators of pondering so.” She offers Millie $40 for each eavesdropping session.
It’s the cash that’s the sticking level right here, much more so than Agatha’s age and energy relative to Millie’s lack of identical, much more so than their covert listening. By giving Millie money, Agatha commodifies their relationship, and Millie, aware of her homeowning objective, permits it to be commodified.
They aren’t alone. This can be a darkish guide the place cash shapes every little thing, even essentially the most intimate of relationships. It’s love and luxury and savior and corrupter all of sudden.
But Reid appears to be focusing so strongly on the thematic play of cash and energy throughout this guide that her plotting has turn out to be a bit of clumsy. Agatha and Millie’s eavesdropping scheme is so clearly sure for doom from the beginning that it’s tough to droop your disbelief lengthy sufficient to think about that both of those allegedly good and well-meaning girls would assume it was a good suggestion. I spent many of the guide satisfied I had in some way missed a misunderstanding that made the plan make sense to one in all them initially, particularly for the reason that guide is crammed to capability with completely different characters and it could be simple to overlook one thing. I hadn’t.
That Agatha and Millie would make such a choice feels particularly jarring as a result of one in all Reid’s strengths is the cruel realism of her fashion. Reid has a knack for the rhythms of spoken dialogue, her characters’ sentences all punctuated exactly to disclose the key insecurities guiding their uptalk, the nervousness that makes them rush their phrases collectively.
Nonetheless, there are occasions when Reid leans so closely on her strengths that they begin to appear to be crutches. Reid’s ear for dialogue is impeccable, however over time the plethora of one-word Ohmygods turns into wearying, and the phonetically spelled Southern accents (“Ohmahgoodness”) grating.
You get the same impact with Reid’s fondness for summing up her characters in a single telling element. Considered one of Agatha’s topics is “the kind of particular person Agatha might image holding her cellphone for all the period of a painfully gradual, high-resistance elliptical experience.” Millie’s mother is the sort of one who eschews make-up, aside from “blush, tinted Chapstick, and a tasseled pashmina” at celebratory dinners.
The primary few occasions Reid does this sort of one-sentence character examine, you’re delighted together with her cleverness. By the point she describes one lady as having “the physique of a lady who was a gymnast as a baby” and one other as wanting “like a backpack,” nevertheless, her one-liners have began to really feel so particular as to turn out to be meaningless.
The large drawback with Come and Get It is the alternative as the issue plaguing its sentences: it’s too significant. Each occasion on this novel is so freighted with symbolic weight in regards to the larger story of American neoliberalism that it loses the specificity that will make it actually compelling.
Reid’s exact, life like fashion saved me fortunately dashing via this novel to its end, and its visceral ambition and thematic scope has saved me interested by it within the days afterward. Nonetheless, regardless of Reid’s expertise and talent, her characters by no means fairly got here alive for me.
