Kiley Reid’s second novel Come &Get It might appear to be a campus-set comedy of manners, but the joke will be on you if you think it’s only a satire of a self-involved academic/writer and a gaggle of coeds who lean on the phrase "ohmygod" a lot. It’s not that Reid fails to deliver witty insights about life at the University of Arkansas in 2017. For instance, at one point she describes her most sympathetic character Millie as follows: “She stood bright-eyed in her red RA polo with the posture of a zookeeper who feeds sea lions for a crowd.” But Reid has much more on her mind than pointing out character quirks, consumerist obsession, and social peccadillos.
The academic, Agatha Paul, is a visiting professor teaching nonfiction and cultural and media studies, who gets most obsessed researching the young women of Belgrade (really its name, and it is not a choice housing location) dorm, first examining their thoughts on marriage, only to pivot to exploring their ideas about money. That’s a hint — the novel limns what one can and should do for money, but without any preachiness.
But it’s Agatha’s first book, Satellite Grief, that turns out to be the crucial connection bringing characters together. Reid holds out what that provocatively titled book is about until about two-thirds of the way into Come & Get It — up to that point we only know the saddest sack character Kennedy has a dog-eared copy of it by her dorm bedside. When Reid finally lays out both Agatha’s and Kennedy’s tragic backstories, it’s clear how serious a world she’s constructed. Generally when reviewing a book, I take copious notes, but this time I just got swept away by the power of the tale, caught in the noose of its emotions. The book embodies that painful, precise line from Renoir’s Rules of the Game: “The awful thing about life is this: everyone has their reasons.”