53 pages • 1 hour read
Kiley ReidCome and Get It
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Kiley Reid
Kiley Reid’s debut novel, Such a Fun Age, was lauded upon its release in 2020, earning strong reviews and a spot on the New York Times best-seller list. Centered around a Black babysitter who is wrongly accused of kidnapping a white baby, the novel explores class and racial dynamics in the millennial era. Reid started writing this novel before entering the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop, having worked as a babysitter for six years in Manhattan.
Come and Get It is born out of similar circumstances: Reid came upon the premise for the novel while conducting interviews with undergraduate students about their relationship to wealth and status. In one case, an interviewee had mentioned that she had received a “practice paycheck” from her father, which is a detail that Reid directly transplants into the first chapter of her novel (Liu, Rebecca. “‘Money Runs Our Lives’: Novelist Kiley Reid on Education, Excess and What Makes Us Squirm.” The Guardian, 20 Jan. 2024). Reid is also aware of the complex social dynamics that dictate academic life. During her graduate studies in Iowa, she taught an undergraduate-level writing class. Notably, one of the book’s central characters, Kennedy Washburn, begins her story at the University of Iowa before moving to the University of Arkansas and is inspired to pursue writing with the encouragement of a graduate-level teacher. Reid continues to teach as an assistant professor at the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. Her second novel’s focus on class and racial dynamics continues a trend established in her debut.
Literary Context: Varsity Novel
Come and Get It’s setting at the University of Arkansas places it squarely in the literary genre known as the varsity novel. The varsity novel is closely related to the campus novel since both usually adopt university settings. However, where the campus novel typically focuses on faculty characters, the varsity novel usually features a wider cast of student characters, which is the case with Reid’s novel.
Though more of Come and Get It takes place in Belgrade Dormitory than on the university campus itself, the characters are brought together by the social circumstances of the American tertiary education system. One sign of this is the fact that Belgrade is early on identified as the dormitory reserved for scholarship and transfer students. This already creates one dimension of social difference among the residents who inhabit the dorm, especially as the first chapter raises questions about who is given access to educational opportunities and how the possession of wealth mediates power.
In varsity novels, characters reveal their true nature to the reader while simultaneously discovering it for the first time. This is consistent with the university experience, where students transition from adolescence to adulthood and find resolutions for the complex tensions that characterized their teen years. Kennedy Washburn’s character arc follows this particular shape as she tries to resolve the trauma of her ostracism in her previous academic community but finds isolation in Fayetteville. Similarly, Millie Cousins attempts to live up to the expectations of her role but falls prey to critical lapses in judgment that put her aspirations at risk.
As the novel progresses, the central characters’ relationships are complicated by professional status. In particular, Agatha Paul, a professor, enters a relationship with Millie, an undergraduate student. Though both are consenting adults and Millie is not Agatha’s student, the novel casts doubt on the power dynamics of such relationships, asking if imbalance is inherent to age-gap relationships.
Other varsity novels include English author Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, American novelist Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Marriage Plot, and The Idiot by American writer Elif Batuman.
