Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid review / An essential new talent

 

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Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid review – an essential new talent

A thrilling millennial take on the 19th-century novel of manners investigates race, friendship and privilege

Sara Collins

Thu 2 January 2020

U

S author Kiley Reid offers a refreshing take on an age-old question: can we connect across barriers of race, gender, wealth and privilege? Emira Tucker, who works in Philadelphia as a babysitter for news anchor Peter and lifestyle guru Alix, takes their toddler, Briar, to an upscale supermarket where suspicions are stirred because she is black and the child is white. The security guard accuses her of kidnapping, and is only appeased when Emira calls Peter. (Peter is “an old white guy”, she declares, “so I’m sure everyone will feel better”.) A lesser novel would have lingered here, in territory that’s painfully familiar from countless viral incidents. But in Reid’s debut the incident heralds a caustically funny skewering of the sort of well-intentioned liberal who congratulates themselves on having black guests at dinner.

The story toggles between Emira, offbeat, aimless and fresh out of college, and Alix, wealthy overseer of a woman-centric brand built on her knack for getting free merchandise by writing letters. Alix and Peter’s house gets egged after Peter blunders into a mortifying episode of on-air racism – while covering the story of a black boy inviting a white girl to prom, he blurts: “Let’s hope that last one asked her father first.” In the wake of her husband’s racist faux pas, Alix resolves to befriend her black babysitter: “to wake the fuck up … To get to know Emira Tucker.” This desire intensifies until it begins to seem like a kind of neurosis, leaving her in thrall to feelings that aren’t “completely unlike a crush”. She spies on the lock screen of Emira’s phone (“always filled with information that was youthful, revealing, and completely addicting”), traps her at the kitchen table for awkward chats and begs her to join the family for Thanksgiving, with disastrous results.

When Emira starts dating Kelley, a white man who films the supermarket incident on his phone, we detect a similarly disconcerting earnestness. What threatens to scupper the relationship isn’t the racial divide but Kelley’s racial tourism. His keenness tips the scales suspiciously towards fetishisation: he’s “like that one white guy at every black wedding who’s, like, super-hyped to do the Cupid Shuffle”. He only dates black women, and seems to have exclusively black friends. Alix opines that Kelley surrounds “himself with black people just so he can feel good about himself”, failing entirely to recognise herself in the mirror of her own remark. One of the novel’s deep ironies is that the white people in Emira’s life are more fixated on race than she is. Like many a young person drifting between part-time jobs, she’s most consumed by angst about what the hell she’s doing with her life. The supermarket incident prompts not anger but wry self-reflection: “more than the racial bias, the night … came back to her with a nauseating surge and a resounding declaration that hissed, You don’t have a real job.”

Kelley is 'like that one white guy at every black wedding who’s, like, super-hyped to do the Cupid Shuffle'The illuminating examination of Emira’s inner life, the deep anxiety of a young woman whose life choices are dictated by the demands of rent and health insurance, gives the novel the flavour of a bildungsroman. However, this is juxtaposed with Alix and Kelley’s objectifying emphasis on her race and failure to see her as a full person, because of their quixotic, guilt-driven overcompensation. Conversations are failures in communication. Each talks at Emira, but never really listens, manufacturing an idea of her that fits their own projections. Language styles of toddlers, yummy mummies and Emira’s homegirls are captured pitch-perfectly in the novel while true understanding flickers always out of reach. Emira constantly has to explain things that with her group of black female friends can go blessedly unspoken. In one scene, her frustration with Kelley spills over: “I need you to get that like … being angry and yelling in a store means something different for me than it would for you.” It’s not opacity of vocabulary or vernacular that renders us so impenetrable to one another, the novel suggests, but rather our unwillingness to pay attention.

Yet to call this a novel about race would be to diminish its considerable powers, just as to focus on race alone is to diminish a human being. It skillfully interweaves race-related explorations with astute musings on friendship, motherhood, marriage, love and more, underlining that there’s so much more to us than skin. This is the calling card of a virtuoso talent, a thrilling millennial spin on the 19th-century novel of manners that may call to mind another recent literary sensation. I had thought of ending this review by predicting that Reid may be the next Sally Rooney. But Such a Fun Age is so fresh and essential that I predict instead that next year we’ll be anxiously awaiting the next Kiley Reid.

• Sara Collins’s The Confessions of Frannie Langton is published by Penguin.

THE GUARDIAN