Come And Get It – Kiley Reid

I’ve been eagerly awaiting an opportunity to read Kiley Reid’s follow up to her incredible debut – Such A Fun Age – since the moment I finished it, so I went into Come And Get It with very high expectations. I was hoping for another brilliantly incisive contemporary novel about race relations and ego, but I got… something else.

Come And Get It starts with Agatha Paul, an author and visiting professor, arriving at an Arkansas college to research weddings for her forthcoming book. There, she meets Millie, a 24-year-old Residential Assistant (RA) who coordinates a short research interview with a few of her dorm’s residents. The girls she interviews are fascinating, and soon Agatha finds herself more interested in their attitudes towards money and class than she is their opinions on nuptials. Perhaps her next book should take a different direction…

That all sounds simple enough, but the opening chapter was really difficult to parse. Even a few chapters later, I was still flummoxed, and wondering where it was all going. Reid jumps around between each character’s present and past, and it takes a long time for the stories to come together in any kind of tangible way. I kept finding myself wondering “wait, who is this again? and why do they matter to the story?”.

Agatha winds up taking an ethically dubious (to say the least) route to get more material for her new book. She sits in Millie’s dorm room of an evening, eavesdropping on the three students (Taylor, Jenna, and Casey) in the neighbouring room – and paying Millie $40 a night for her trouble. She even starts selling snippets of what she overhears (with her own embellishments) to Teen Vogue, and eventually starts sleeping with Millie as well (neglecting to tell her about her not-quite-separated ex-wife who she came to Arkansas to escape).

Come And Get It is a really strange and meandering book, and not in a way that feels deliberate or measured. It’s a very messy story – at times deeply disturbing, but mostly just directionless. It felt like Reid identified an interesting subculture with a unique patois (i.e., college girls in the 21st century), and tried to build a novel around it. Unfortunately, there’s not much a plot in sociolinguistics, so there’s not much of one in Come And Get It.

And, I must say, Reid’s most egregious crime in Come And Get It is the horrible, horrible, unexpected dog death. It made me throw up a bit in my mouth. Even if I had been thoroughly enjoying this weird novel about strange people in circumstances unfamiliar to me, I would have wanted to bin it on that basis alone. Dog-lovers beware – it’s probably best to skip this one entirely.

Read Come And Get It on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of Come And Get It:

• “What is up with this writer? Why is she so popular? Listed for the Booker Prize?? This writer crafts sentences like, “He raised his shoulders then lowered them.” You mean, he SHRUGGED?? And her pointless description of people’s clothing, using color names like “lacinato kale blue” and saying a jacket is “feathery fuchsine.” (Hint: if the color of a character’s clothing is not central to the action or plot, no one gives a f&^% about it; if someone needs to look up a color you are just being an obnoxious writer.) The worst is when she describes a piece of cheese as “impressive and big.”” – noragp
• “I enjoyed Reid’s debut, Such a Fun Age. I did not have the same experience with this novel.” – Daniela
• “A sentient mind in NYC read this in manuscript and published it?” – Tyson Duffy