Such a Fun Age

Kiley Reid is a young US writer whose first novel arrives lavished with endorsements. Publications on both sides of the Atlantic have tipped Such a Fun Age as one of the hottest books of 2020. Screen rights have been snapped up. One writer even claims that it should have the same sort of impact as Sally Rooney.

Set in contemporary Philadelphia, the novel traces the relationship between Alix, a wealthy white mother, and Emira, her 25-year-old black babysitter.

When Alix calls Emira to ask her to take her toddler, Briar, to the local grocery store while the family deals with an emergency, it’s close to midnight and Emira arrives in her going-out gear.

The shop is ‘‘super white’’, the kind that stocks bone broth, truffle butter and $8 packets of yoghurt-covered raisins. Nothing good can happen here.

Before long, Emira is accused of kidnap by a security guard.

This deftly observed set piece is the solid foundation on which Riley builds her biting story of race, class and motherhood.

Alix, a social-media lifestyle entrepreneur who thinks mainly in terms of her brand, is mortified by the event. She becomes desperate to befriend Emira and prove to her how progressive she is: she begs her to stay for a glass of wine, reads her text messages in secret and is thrilled to show her that she has black friends.

The infatuation isn’t reciprocated. Emira has other things to worry about: she’s broke, about to be kicked off her parents’ health insurance and isn’t as successful as her friends. Her main impression of her employer is not, as clueless Alix hopes, that she is woke but that she is a ropey mother.

Told in the close third person, the narrative juggles between Emira and Alix: it’s a vantage point that neatly skewers the many cringeworthy disconnects between the two women.

Propelling the story is a love triangle. Emira begins dating Kelley, a handsome and caring white man who filmed the event at the grocery store.

It transpires, at an explosive Thanksgiving dinner, that he took Alix’s virginity in high school.

Their history is messy, still unresolved and Kelley tries to force Emira to quit working for Alix because, he claims, she exploits black people under the banner of protecting them. Ironically, Kelley, too, has his own strong pong of white saviour.

As a layered and evocative social commentary, Reid makes an excellent job of it, drilling down into the virtue signalling and the motivations of the white liberal elite.

She wraps serious messages in chatty prose that is a pleasure to read: dialogue crackles, characters pulse with the tics of modern American specimens.

There are moments of overexplicitness though. We don’t, for instance, need to be told that Alix and Kelley are engaged in a game of ‘‘Which One of Us Is Actually More Racist’’.

That much is obvious.

Another drawback is a plot that tends towards the pulpy with twists that swing well wide of plausible.

Such a Fun Age might not be as accomplished as Conversations with Friends, Rooney’s debut, but it’s witty and subversive and leaves you feeling impressively uncomfortable.

– Sunday Times, London