Book review: Rich satire of monied classes

Booker Prize longlisted author writes in a precise, realistic style but there are so many characters the novel can be confusing

Sat, 24 Feb, 2024 - 01:00

Tina Neylon

The central relationship in Come and Get It is between Agatha, a wealthy, middle-aged white professor, and 24-year-old Millie, a black student working as a resident assistant, a ‘house mother’ to girls living in a student residence.

Millie has chosen the house she wants to own when she graduates, so money is important to her, and she works at a coffee bar as well.

The two women meet when Agatha moves to the college town of Fayetteville, to teach and to research her latest book, and where she first pays Millie to find her students to interview about how young southern women think about weddings. However, Agatha changes the subject of her research when she hears the wealthy girls who are living in the residence discussing how they spend money:

“The first was she didn’t really care about weddings, not enough to write a book about them. The second was she was completely enraptured by these young women, their relationship to money. … She didn’t want to be friends with them, but she liked listening to them.”

Millie offers to let her eavesdrop on conversations between the girls, from her own room, and Agatha pays her for every session.

It’s a strange arrangement, and it’s hard to believe two intelligent women would pursue such an unethical scheme.

Agatha is lesbian and is recovering from a break-up, and Millie is infatuated with her.

Some of the students are spoiled, relying on their parents to pay for everything; others, including another significant character, Kennedy, less so.

Kiley Reid is good at capturing the cattiness between the young women, as well as their worries and fears. They argue about dirty dishes, have ridiculous competitions about Halloween decorations, gossip about each other, and then complain about others gossiping about them.

While race and class feature, money is the central theme: Who needs more of it, how it’s acquired, how it affects relationships, how society is obsessed with it. Agatha can influence Millie not only because of her age and professional standing, but because she has money to pay her. Money was also at the root of Agatha’s break-up, as her dancer partner, Robin, was constantly sponging off her.

There are so many characters the novel can be confusing. It’s a challenge to delineate between the young students and Millie’s colleagues. It’s difficult, therefore, to believe in them, to feel involved with them, to care what happens. Reid writes in a precise, realistic style, but often goes into tedious detail.

The backstories of some of the characters are far more convincing than the central narrative. Two examples are the sections on the relationship between Agatha and Robin, and the account of Kennedy’s childhood and experiences before college.

Kiley Reid is the author of Such a Fun Age, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize.

Her writing has been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, and The Guardian.

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