Victoria Vilton
Come and Get It, by Kiley Reid. Penguin Random House, 2024, 400pp., $29
The paltry 100-word blurb adorning the dustjacket of Come and Get It by Kiley Reid justifies itself only once one has turned the last page of the novel. The summary offers next to nothing by way of plot, save a few sentences introducing the premise, promising “desire, consumption, and bad behavior.” As the novel progresses, the reader will find that there isn’t much of a plot to summarize in the first place. Reid centers her novel on a pervasive alienation, leaving the reader somehow unsatisfied with the novel they have just read, yet simultaneously pleased with the crumbs of storyline that Reid offers. This is a dichotomy that yields to a strange purgatory, leaving the reader to wonder: “What have I just read? What was the point of this book?”
Come and Get It is a rather grim reflection of what happens when great expectations—New York Times Bestseller list expectations—collide with a relatively lackluster story: it is a book that feels special only in hindsight.
Alienation dominates this novel, with regard to both the insularity of the story and its characters, and with Reid herself, who estranges her readers with an unsatisfying ending. The characters throughout the novel are strangely detached; they are alienated from themselves and their peers, from their responsibilities and the world around them, and, perhaps most importantly, from money.
Set in 2017, at the University of Arkansas, this novel follows two principal characters: a professor and author named Agatha Paul, working on her newest book while recovering from a tense breakup, and Millie Cousins, an ambitious RA attempting to survive her second senior year in college, returning from a yearlong hiatus to care for an ailing parent.
The novel begins with Agatha interviewing three students at Belgrade—the dorm where Millie works and the only scholarship and transfer student dorm on the college campus. She questions the students—three attractive, seemingly well-off, white women—about weddings (the focus of her new book), but her attention is quickly hooked upon the way the women discuss money. Tyler, one of Millie’s students and the leader of the group, establishes a strange rapport with her friends and Agatha, throwing around microaggressions and displaying her blasé attitude toward money throughout the interview.
Agatha becomes quickly fascinated with these women as they explain their definition of ghetto—conveniently using Millie, the only Black RA, as an example—and the “practice paychecks” they receive from their parents. Agatha, who befriends Millie over their shared bemusement at the interviewees, begins to write a series of articles from the perspective of these women, giving them fake identities and playing up their personalities. All the while, a disconcerting, unethical romantic tension brews between Millie and Agatha.
What follows is the first move that divorces this novel from a more mundane, banal reality: Millie abuses her position as an RA, allowing Agatha to secretly record her students’ conversations. Agatha pays her generously in return and quickly loses any integrity she might have established at the novel's beginning by sensationalizing these women's lives and fabricating quotes for maximum readability. Agatha manipulates her readers in this way, crafting entirely plausible (fictional) stories that manipulate the truth in a realistic enough way to be believable.
Come and Get It is non-linear, jumping between memories but staying grounded in Belgrade. Everything about the novel is tethered to this dorm: an illicit affair between Millie and Agatha, dorm pranks, microaggressions between roommates, and even a shocking suicide attempt. And Reid represents this all in painstaking detail.
Before the reader knows what a chapter is about, they know each item in the room, the time, every movement the character makes in the world created on the page. Even the sensation of a necklace sliding across a neck. She is doubly deliberate in the way she makes her characters speak. “Ohmygod” is slurred to form one grating word, repeated a minimum of 500 times throughout the novel. When the students speak, it is exhausting to read; their youth and immaturity are conveyed purely through diction.
The reader is left with a novel so insular, so singular, that one feels almost suffocated. As a character and location study, hyperfixating on very specific observations certainly has value. Yet this cannot be overstated: whatever social commentary Reid was attempting to make was lost in the plethora of details, significant and otherwise.
It is clear Reid most craves the book to demonstrate the way her characters interact with money; a political cartoon capitalist pig smirks at the viewer from the cover. Each character in Come and Get It has a complex relationship with money, which affects how they connect with the people around them.
Tyler, one of the vaguely racist students Agatha originally interviewed, finds herself at the top of the socioeconomic ladder in the financial aid dorm. She has money to spend for fun and qualifies for a scholarship because of an incarcerated parent. This distinguishes her from Millie, whose relationship with money takes center stage. Millie compulsively hoards her money in the toe of a boot and picks up odd jobs wherever she can, hoping to squirrel enough away to buy a house. She is ambitious in an unsettling way, willing to give up opportunities that seem like the obvious choice. On the other hand, Agatha is a successful author afforded the luxury of not thinking about money. This is not a reality that many authors experience, even ones that have achieved success by our arbitrary standards. Certainly, Reid could be attempting to project a bit of herself into Agatha, funneling all her hopes about writing through her character.
Her analysis of capitalism is not obvious; instead, it seems she wants the reader to draw their own conclusions. This is not a novel of sweeping statements but merely a single frame from a random scene in these fictional characters’ lives, displayed for analysis as the viewer desires. The reader may interpret an occurrence as they wish, may read into Reid’s words as much as they like. Her intentions when writing the novel are insignificant to the consumption of the story.
The novel begins to deflate as its purpose remains murky. The story meanders aimlessly, pulling the reader in one compelling direction before diverting to another. The reader is then forced to overinterpret every word and every bit of dialogue, searching for their value.
At one point, Agatha, questioned about her debut work of nonfiction, says, “It’s a little embarrassing now. Well—I’m not embarrassed that I wrote it, but there’s what I wrote it for and what people read it for.” So, why did Reid write this book, and why did people read it? What compels a person to pick Come and Get It up? What forces a person to finish it?
Reading is often fashioned as something intentional, pointed, and purposeful. For years, schoolchildren have been required to read books of all genres and scopes as part of an endeavor to teach them something new. This type of education implies that everything has meaning, everything has a purpose. 200 pages of reading per week for a single class at a university is expected, and when such a responsibility is shirked, students feel guilty. We have been reared on intentionality. Every reading is vital to participate in class discussions and write final papers. Busy work is transformed into something important by looming deadlines and GPAs. It often feels like there is no work in school that does not mean something, if even in some small way. But what happens when it feels like reading something lacks a purpose?
Come and Get It builds toward something and nothing at the same time. In 384 pages, the reader lives with the main characters, experiencing their interactions with each other in a way that feels intimate. Yet all depth and societal implications feel glancing, merely hinted at. Reid does not push. Her conversations about racism and money are never thorough. Resolution does not exist in this book. No one is ever punished for their nasty pranks or their unprofessional journalism. The book's last line is merely an insignificant piece of dialogue, leaving the reader in the lurch, wondering: what will happen to any of these people?
Reid employs pseudo-vignettes, maintaining one storyline throughout while branching off wherever she sees fit. There is not a sufficient unpacking of anything to really classify this as social commentary, any more than a Black person or a financially-conscious person existing is social commentary.
But there must be value in such a reading experience. This novel forces you to slow down, to experience the quotidian lives of Reid’s characters, with bits of drama laced in every so often. Money and race are essential to this novel the way they are essential to real life. There is nothing—no friction —to hang onto. The story is corporeal because it is forgettable. It is real because it is unremarkable. Come and Get It offers an escape into the University of Arkansas for however long the reader desires.
Come and Get It is a novel with nothing to come and get–and perhaps this was Reid’s intention after all. In a world ruled by transactions, whether of goods or services, Reid leverages her audience’s demand for a story “worthy” enough to spend their time on and frustrates that desire. This book serves as a study in frivolity, rejecting reading as an economic commodity and instead forcing reading simply for the sake of seeing words on a page.