A Book with a Cataclysmic Ending
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This is Kiley Reid’s second book. The first one, Such a Fun Age, was long-listed for the 2020 Booker Prize for Fiction. It was also a Reese’s Book Club pick. And it got reviews in every sort of major publication such as the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, The Guardian, Harvard Review, The Atlantic, and on it goes.
This second book, Come & Get It, is following in those same book-review-footsteps. Of special interest to me is the fact that the new book was reviewed by my favorite book reviewer, Ron Charles, of the Washington Post. Let me tell you a little about the plot and then I can tell you what he said about it.
Come & Get It is set in a dorm at the University of Arkansas in 2017. It features two main characters, Agatha Paul and Millie Cousins. Agatha is a visiting professor. She is doing research for a book about weddings. Millie is an RA at one of the dorms. It is through Millie that Agatha arranges a one-time interview with three students. After chatting with them, it is immediately apparent that her focus should be on their attitude toward money in general, not just as it relates to weddings.
To tell you more about these two characters, Agatha is a sophisticated white woman who is 38 years old and who is financially set in part because of a book that she wrote, Satellite Grief. Millie is a 24-year-old African American woman. She is an organized, hard-working, focused person, who is saving all her money to buy a house. And oh yes, she is dazzled by Agatha.
The two women grow closer as Agatha comes to Millie’s dorm room regularly to use the thin walls of the room to listen in on the three girls in the suite next door. In this clandestine manner, she gathers intimate information about these students and their friends. She casually leaves two twenty dollar bills behind on Millie’s desk after each research session. Clearly, it’s not just the thin walls that Agatha “uses,” it’s Millie too.
Ron Charles says that both of Reid’s books have to do with “the way unequal economic positions create clashing sets of values.” About the new book he says, “This is a novel that gets down and dirty with the budget. The most explicit exposures involve who has “fun money” and who doesn’t, who thinks $20 is a serious commitment and who can toss it off like a light kiss.” He closes his review telling us this is a “spectacular intersection of class, racism, academic politics and journalistic ethics.”
I had a lesser opinion, but I’m willing to believe I am not smart enough to pick up on all that.
Basically, I had two main complaints, though one of them turned out to be positive by books’ end. First, all the dialect in the book was hard for me to deal with. There was teenage dialect and one character spoke in southern dialect. Overall, it was over the top. As an example of both in just one quote: “When mah sister got married mah mom was like, ‘You need to pay for your shoes,’ out of nowhere. And mah sister was like, ‘’Ummm okay?’”
My other complaint was there were too many characters to follow and too many seemingly unimportant story lines to follow as well. There was strife between three roommates – often over dishes being left in the sink. There was Millie’s relationship with other RA’s and with their superiors. There was a prank the college students played on Millie that was told in great detail and then a prank Millie and her fellow RA’s played back on the students. There was Agatha’s back story which included a wife from whom she was separated and a very traumatic experience that was the impetus for her book about grief. Oh, and then one of those battling roommates had a very traumatic back story that gave her a connection to Agatha’s book.
To the author’s credit, she brings all of these disparate elements together into a cataclysmic ending that will give book clubs lots to talk about. Also, book clubs will have even more to discuss thanks to the loose ends that the author does NOT tie up.
Bottom line: The big finish made struggling through the book worthwhile, but I did indeed struggle through it.
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Click here to learn more about the book on Amazon.
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