It’s always thrilling to read a debut novel and find it so compelling that you spend a year proselytising about it. And always disappointing when the author’s follow-up feels like a bit of a damp squib. Kiley Reid’s Such a Fun Age was my favourite novel of 2019, so it gives me no pleasure to say that Come and Get It is my first disappointment of 2024.
The two central characters are 38-year-old professor Agatha, who has arrived at the University of Arkansas to study the attitudes of young female students towards weddings, and Millie, a resident assistant 14 years her junior.
We’re led to believe that Agatha is a figure of some intelligence, and yet her area of scholarship seems trivial at best while the students to whom Millie introduces her are, for want of a better word, airheads, the sort of young people who preface every sentence with “Yeah, no”, and have abandoned traditional punctuation in favour of the word “like”.
Millie is equally contradictory. Apparently sensible, and thoroughly committed to her work, she somehow fails to recognise that accepting money from one of her charges to change room assignments might be considered unethical.
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The most frustrating thing is that Reid is a brilliant writer. At an awkward dinner, ‘a ruthless silence settled over the table and Agatha took a bath in it.’ One student is described as looking “like a backpack”, which is as brilliant as it is bizarre. Best of all, however, is this zinger: “Sex with Dominic was a little like going to the gym: a chore at first, but halfway through, she was happy to have gone.”
Come and Get It reads like the work of a skilled novelist who has lumbered herself with a story that just isn’t very interesting. None of the characters seems curious about the world while the romantic lives of the students aren’t touched on at all, leaving them rather sexless. Plates left unwashed in a sink are treated like a human rights abuse. And not in a satirical way. It genuinely seems to matter.
When Reid is on fire, she blazes like a beacon on a hill. Sadly, on this occasion, the flame burns a little less bright.
