Smart novel gets down and dirty
Come & Get It Kiley Reid Putnam
Kiley Reid's smart new novel, Come & Get It, takes place in 2017 in a dorm at the University of Arkansas. At the opening, we meet a visiting professor named Agatha Paul who writes about how people conduct family events such as funerals and birthdays. She's come to the dorm to ask three female students questions for her new work of cultural criticism on weddings.
The students — “Jenna: tall. Casey: southern. Tyler: mean” — offer their own casually outrageous comments on fashion, race and family expectations, a tangled ball of social attitudes and mores batted about with just the gentlest encouragement from Agatha.
But the subject at the root of this discussion is money: How much should a wedding cost? Who should pay? Not surprisingly, the students' presumptions depend a lot on how wealthy their families are.
Of course, there's sex in this story, too — how could there not be? But it's noteworthy that the real complications and the most intimate details involve financial figures rather than physical ones. This is a novel that gets down and dirty with the budget. For students working to keep body and soul together, life is a series of relentless calculations; for those with an endless supply of cash, the wealth that elevates their lives and informs their sense of what's possible feels both natural and invisible.
The key is Reid's exquisitely calibrated tone, which slips tantalizingly between sympathy and satire. She's so good at capturing both the syrupy support and catty criticism these young women swap, and yet she also demonstrates a profound understanding of their fears and anxieties. Which brings us to the moral centre of Come & Get It.
Agatha's unofficial research assistant is a 24-year-old Black student named Millie. Aside from her classes, Millie's real job is working as a resident assistant in the dorm, and she's good at it. She cares about her duties and she needs the money, even if the young women under her watch sometimes treat her like a servant. (They hate to say it, but “Millie can be ... a little ghetto.”)
When Agatha reaches out to Millie for help setting up interviews, she's happy to oblige. And later, when they grow closer, Millie gives Agatha a secret perch from which she can observe and record students without their knowledge. Millie has no sense this is unethical; Agatha's too expedient to care.
The tension in Come & Get It builds slowly — arguments ensue about dirty dishes, gossips complain about being gossiped about by other gossips. If these things feel unrelated and inconsequential, you won't have to wait long. You're in the presence of a master plotter who's engineering a spectacular intersection of class, racism, academic politics and journalistic ethics.
Reid spots all the grains of irritation and deceit that get caught in the machinery of social life until the whole contraption suddenly lurches to a calamitous halt.
Come and get it, indeed!