Novelist gets the little stuff right but not the big stuff in ‘Come and Get It’

In a world of multifaceted, ubiquitous social interactions, Kiley Reid is a master at exploring the minutiae.

Her new novel, “Come and Get it,” showcases the banal and often petty world of a college dormitory on the University of Arkansas campus, detailing the pranks, sexual lives and power dynamics between its privileged and less-privileged inhabitants.

Reid’s follow-up to “Such a Fun Age” aspires to be a comedy of modern 20-something collegiate manners, but doesn’t always rise above the vacuous consciousness of its protagonists. The various narrative threads that Reid weaves throughout really do not gain momentum until about two-thirds of the way through, which is too many pages to be carried along by mostly unlikable characters.

Reid’s talents lie in documenting the everyday absurdities that we routinely subject each other to — sometimes in work interactions, and more often in the realm of the intimate. For me, the most powerful scene in the book was when Agatha, a 30-something Black lesbian academic, is pulled into a dinner at a restaurant with Keisha, a young, white dancer (who like most of the characters in the book, is annoyingly fond of the phrase “Ohmygod,”) by her Black lesbian partner, Robin, also a dancer.

Agatha does not want to be there, and during the dinner Robin casually reveals to Keisha and her husband that she is not, in fact, moving to Arkansas with Agatha for a year, as they had previously discussed (Agatha has accepted a one-year teaching position at the University of Arkansas).

Already miffed at having to be at a dinner she didn’t want to be at, with shallow people who get on her nerves, Agatha takes this as a sign to really let loose at the dinner. She proceeds to verbally take apart Keisha in a passive-aggressive way that everyone feels but not everyone can articulate. And Robin, being Agatha’s intimate partner, finds all of this instantly recognizable and triggering.

“The way Robin reached for her fork, Agatha knew she was livid. But the degree to which Agatha didn’t care was almost unhealthy. Her resentment felt round and hard, a tender cyst under the skin,” Reid writes. Readers know truth when they see it, and the hard topography of emotional truth is the novelist’s most potent terrain – which is why it is both shocking and a relief to encounter it. Reid offers such gifts to us on multiple occasions.

These entertaining gems of insight, hidden throughout the book, are not enough to overcome a haphazard narrative arc, central conflicts that are trivial and acerbic and characters whose inner lives still feel unknown to us by its conclusion. While “Come and Get It” offers meaningful cultural analysis and critique of young Black and white women’s financial and consumer lives, it does not work as well as a coherent, unified novel.

Shannon Gibney lives and writes in Minneapolis.

Come and Get It

By: Kiley Reid.

Publisher: Putnam, 400 pages, $29.