Kiley Reid’s Come and Get it and the (cost-of-living on) campus novel

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Every university appears to have one corridor of residence that nobody desires to stay in. The one that appears like a multi-storey automotive park, however much less interesting. The one with the odor. Its inhabitants consult with it in apologetic, self-deprecating tones; everybody else makes jokes about the type of folks that find yourself there. 

In Come and Get It, Kiley Reid’s follow-up to her best-selling 2020 debut Such a Fun Age, that constructing is the fictional Belgrade dormitory. The remainder of the University of Arkansas, Reid tells us, has a “screen-saver, campus-visit, Scholastic Book Fair beauty to it”, however Belgrade appears exempt from these charms. It is the place college students are allotted rooms final minute, maybe after a collection of admin errors. Being related to it has its personal area of interest social stigma. Most of its inhabitants are on scholarships, so the subtext is that they will’t afford to complain; others have transferred from different establishments, arriving at Belgrade with no concept of its pariah standing.

Such a Fun Age supplied an incisive, deftly dealt with tackle weighty subjects like race and privilege, telling the story of two ladies: Emira, a younger Black nanny who’s accused of kidnapping her white cost throughout a late-night journey to a grocery store, and her employer Alix, a girlbossy feminist influencer. Reid was particularly sharp on liberal guilt; her novel preceded the Black Lives Matter marches of summer season 2020 by a couple of months, however you could possibly positively think about Alix posting a performative black sq. on her Instagram account “in solidarity”. In her second guide, Reid brings her sharp gaze to the traditional campus novel, and college life offers her with equally wealthy materials when it involves deconstructing privilege.

She additionally cleverly turns a few of the style’s dustier tropes on their heads. In Come and Get It, professors are hustling for a second revenue. Agatha Paul, a visiting professor and journalist, arrives at Belgrade to analysis her subsequent guide. With the assist of Millie, a resident advisor at the dorm, she units up a gathering with a bunch of undergraduates. The dialog turns in direction of cash, and Agatha is rapt as the ladies – every of them positively thinks that they’re not the normal Belgrade kind – inform her about their hefty allowances (or “practice paychecks”). Soon, she is eavesdropping on conversations via the partitions of Millie’s room, then packaging them up as on-line “Money Diary” options for Teen Vogue; every bit particulars their month-to-month incomings, outgoings and spending habits. The ladies do not know they’re being spied on, and this isn’t the solely moral boundary Agatha will bend throughout her time on campus. Is it flawed for her to have a relationship with a scholar, if that scholar isn’t her scholar? (Usually, in fact, it’s a middle-aged male professor who’s having these conundrums over a lovely feminine scholar, one thing Julia May Jonas’s latest campus novel Vladimir turned on its head. Agatha, although, generally appears to make use of her gender and her sexuality to offer herself a free move).

Campus novels are sometimes novels of concepts. They’re full of wordy debates between idealistic undergraduates (as in recent-ish additions to the canon like Sally Rooney’s Normal People and Elif Batuman’s The Idiot), or generational clashes between lecturers and college students. But Come and Get It by no means ventures inside the classroom; barely one scene takes place in a lecture theatre. Instead, Reid is way more interested by the economics of how her college students bought there, and what they’re doing to get by. Reid, herself an assistant professor at the University of Michigan (who carried out her personal Agatha-style interviews with college students whereas researching her guide), doesn’t allow us to overlook that greater training in America may be large enterprise. Private universities are sometimes sitting on large endowments from rich alumni (Harvard endowment is greater than $50bn, exceeding the GDP of greater than 120 nations) however cost a mean of round $35,000 in annual tuition charges, leaving many saddled with big money owed (public faculties are cheaper, particularly in your house state).

Money is Come and Get It’s animating drive. Its results are significantly pronounced in the dorm: some college students are on scholarships, some are cushioned by parental wealth, and some, like Millie, who’s described as “the type of student that college student-service centres swept up for pictures and profiles”, even must work for his or her wealthier friends. As resident advisors, she and her colleagues Ryland and Colette perform well being and security checks, placed on varied types of organised enjoyable for the dorm’s inhabitants and detangle disputes between roommates; they’re every paid $250 per thirty days. It’s a sum that appears particularly paltry while you examine it to the tens of hundreds of {dollars} they are going to be handing over in tuition charges.

Millie likes her job as a RA, takes it severely, even, and she’s aiming to save lots of up for her own residence, “after becoming mildly addicted to TV shows featuring tiny houses and youngish owners”. But the dynamic (working the place she lives, dwelling the place she works, and basically serving her contemporaries) remains to be uncomfortable, not least as a result of there’s a racial component to this already sophisticated dynamic too (Tyler, the most self-confident of the ladies who Agatha initially interviews, claims Millie, who’s African American, “can be… a little ghetto”, earlier than doing an ungainly impression of her mannerisms).

Each character’s monetary standing is painstakingly documented by Agatha (who applies a equally forensic method to spending in her private life; we be taught that disagreements over cash have soured her relationship along with her profligate ex-girlfriend, Robin). And financial transactions change into plot factors: a $20 tip, handed to Millie in the opening scenes, will come again to hang-out her in direction of the novel’s finish. 

The campus novel has at all times had a behavior of portray universities as worlds outdoors of time. A guide like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History ostensibly takes place in the Eighties, when Tartt herself was a scholar, however it might simply be set years earlier. In Brideshead Revisited, most of the Oxford college students are following traditions that their fathers, grandfathers and past would recognise. The identical is true of Emerald Fennell’s movie Saltburn, which rips off Brideshead fairly shamelessly: if it wasn’t for the Livestrong wristbands and Jack Wills rugby shirts, you may not know that it was set in the mid-Noughties. 

In these tales, your undergraduate years are a interval when pragmatic issues may be put to at least one facet for some time, in pursuit of massive concepts, friendships, consuming, rising up (or, in the case of The Secret History, studying historical Greek and doing murders). Students can exist outdoors the boring boundaries of maturity, excessive on the sense of their very own potential, with loads of time to discover; they may be dwelling on borrowed cash, however they don’t have to consider that but. But that feels more and more like, nicely, fiction. In Come and Get It, Reid’s much less privileged college students get no such grace interval. They’re graduating in an period when scholar debut is overwhelming and the housing market is inconceivable. Is it any marvel that lots of them are always engaged in some type of accounting? Reid’s story would possibly lack a few of the heady drama of these extra conventional campus tales, however it makes up for it in realism and relatability. 

The (literal) price of this ceremony of passage has seeped into different latest additions to the style too. Caroline O’Donoghue’s The Rachel Incident, launched in 2023 however set in Ireland round the 2008 recession, is a coming-of-age story with college as its unfastened backdrop – however most of the coming of age is formed by what happens at the most important character’s part-time job, one she wants to subsidise her learning. Brandon Taylor’s 2020 debut Real Life, in the meantime, deftly dramatised the emotional impression of regularly feeling out of step – financially, socially, emotionally – along with your tutorial friends. Even Saltburn, in its panto-ish approach, gestures in direction of the gaps between the “haves” and the “have nots” on campus, with protagonist Oliver (Barry Keoghan) manipulating his origin story to draw the consideration and sympathy of his upper-class classmates.

Part of what has at all times made campus tales so fascinating is that they present us character as a piece in progress –as a result of our college days have at all times been about understanding our sense of self. But up to date tales like Reid’s are a vital reminder: this leisurely exploration is a luxurious not everybody can afford.

‘Come and Get It’ by Kiley Reid is revealed by Bloomsbury on 30 January, £16.99