Come and Get It

Come and Get It, Kiley Reid’s second novel, delivers a penetrating study of American young adulthood. Reid was born in Los Angeles, California, and raised in Arizona, and she studied fiction writing at the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Reid wrote Come and Get It while her partner was working at the University of Arkansas (UA) in Fayetteville (Washington County), and most of the novel’s action follows undergraduates and a visiting professor as their fates collide on the Fayetteville campus.

Published in 2024 by Putnam on the heels of a heralded debut novel, Such a Fun Age, Reid’s sophomore novel develops a coming-of-age story, featuring plenty of comic moments despite concluding in the aftermath of a traumatic incident. The novel earned positive reviews from major media outlets. The Washington Post, for instance, praised “Reid’s exquisitely calibrated tone, which slips tantalizingly between sympathy and satire.” A review from National Public Radio credited the novel with avoiding the culture-war clichés that often attend discussion of American higher learning.

The novel features multiple protagonists. Readers are first introduced to Agatha Paul, a white writer and professor who relocates to Fayetteville. At first, Come and Get It appears to be Agatha’s story alone, her character deepening as relations with her wife sour. But through the course of her research for a book project, readers are introduced to a handful of undergraduates at the University of Arkansas, and the narrative perspective shifts in kind, focusing mostly on Millie Cousins. Millie is an African American resident assistant in a dorm for scholarship and transfer students, and along with a flock of her residents, she meets with Agatha, who is seeking insight into how young people relate to money. Despite the power and age difference between them, Agatha and Millie eventually become sexually involved. In the meantime, their two plotlines advance in tandem, Agatha’s personal life falling apart and Millie ensnared in residence-hall drama in which a prank war escalates to gruesome tragedy.

Along the way, Come and Get It explores themes pertaining to class and race, as well as exploring what it means to come of age in twenty-first-century America, typified by anxiety about downward mobility and the need to perform conspicuous consumption.

As a campus novel, Come and Get It does not sentimentalize the undergraduate experience, and it is not devised as a love letter to Fayetteville and all things Razorback. Nevertheless, the novel does provide plenty of scenes that will resonate with readers familiar with northwestern Arkansas. For instance, Reid describes Fayetteville as having “a screen-saver, campus-visit, Scholastic Book Fair beauty to it.”

Reid, however, resists the label “campus novel” for this book. In an interview for the Arkansas Times, she argued that the label does not fit, because the novel disregards students’ academic work. And this characterization is true—as it is of most other works considered campus novels. Instead, Reid argues, Come and Get It is best understood as a “dorm novel,” as the novel explores how people behave when their doors are shut.

If the novel’s content is somewhat incidental to the University of Arkansas campus, Reid’s writing of the novel was not. In the Arkansas Times interview, she describes spending the 2016–17 academic year in Fayetteville, applying to graduate programs, working at a local grocery store, and writing in the Fayetteville Public Library and the Arsaga’s coffee shop on Church Avenue, just off the square.

For additional information:
Beal, Wesley. “The Misery of Really Growing Up: A Q&A with Writer Kiley Reid.” Arkansas Times, January 30, 2024. https://arktimes.com/rock-candy/2024/01/30/the-misery-of-really-growing-up-a-qa-with-writer-kiley-reid (accessed June 4, 2024).

Charles, Ron. “Finally, a Novel That Really Understands College Students.” Washington Post, January 24, 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2024/01/24/kiley-reid-come-and-get-it-book-review/ (accessed June 4, 2024).

Holmes, Linda. “‘Come and Get It’: This Fictional Account of College Has Plenty of Truth Baked In.” National Public Radio, January 27, 2024. https://www.npr.org/2024/01/27/1227111977/come-and-get-it-review-kiley-reid-such-a-fun-age (accessed June 4, 2024).

Martin, Philip. “New Book Set at UA Examines Class, Reflexive Privilege.” Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, January 28, 2024, pp. 1E, 4E. Online at https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2024/jan/27/new-book-set-at-ua-examines-class-reflexive/ (accessed June 4, 2024).

Wesley Beal
Lyon College