SUCH A FUN AGE
By Kiley Reid
It’s 2015 and, in a gentrified variation on “driving while black,” 20-something Emira is accosted in the freezer aisle of an upscale Philadelphia supermarket by a security guard accusing her of kidnapping her white charge. In a midnight crisis, the Chamberlain household has called Emira in from her night off to watch their toddler, Briar. But the real crisis unfolds at the store. “With all due respect,” the guard says to an indignant Emira, “you don’t look like you’ve been babysitting tonight.” Somehow this initial confrontation, filmed by a fellow shopper and defused only by the arrival of Briar’s dad, isn’t even the worst offense committed in Kiley Reid’s provocative but soapy debut novel, “Such a Fun Age.” It’s merely a preamble for the main narrative about how two white people end up using their proximity to Emira, a young black woman, as a signifier of their progressiveness.
It’s also a setup made for a rom-com: Obviously, Emira ends up dating Kelley, the handsome white guy who caught the episode on his iPhone. Less obviously, in one of the many lapses in credibility that beleaguer Reid’s plot, it turns out that Kelley has an unresolved history with Briar’s mom, Alix, a high-profile social media entrepreneur and active Hillary supporter. Back in high school, he dumped her, she never forgave him, and the memory of what happened (a lame saga of virginity lost, a house party ruined) convinces each one of the other’s exploitative attitude toward black people.
Emira doesn’t discover this connection until midway through Reid’s novel — and from there Reid’s story, told from the oscillating, third-person perspectives of mother and sitter, takes shape as an interracial love triangle whose convoluted dynamic lets some of the steam out of its worthy message. The older, whiter characters’ liberal anxieties play out as a tug-of-war for Emira’s affections — or, as Alix calls it, “a losing game called ‘Which One of Us Is Actually More Racist?’” Alix grew up garishly rich and now takes pride in things like inviting five whole black people to her catered Thanksgiving dinner table. She shows less interest in her daughter than in the “person she paid to love her,” voyeuristically reading Emira’s texts and attempting to enfold the younger, prettier, poorer girl — the first in her family to go to college — in the web of her influence (as flimsy to us as it is to Emira).
[ Read an excerpt from “Such a Fun Age.” ]
Kelley’s affection for Emira appears more genuine, but his wokeness has a whiff of performance. “Like … I get it,” Emira says to him, “you have a weirdly large amount of black friends, you saw Kendrick Lamar in concert and now you have a black girlfriend … great.” He tries to get Emira to post the supermarket video and to quit working for Alix, who he thinks is trying to use Emira’s blackness for personal gain. But isn’t he, too, in a way? In one of the most powerful lines in the book, Emira articulates to Kelley what a woman of color needs from her white partner: “Lemme try to say this. You get real fired up when we talk about that night at Market Depot. But I don’t need you to be mad that it happened. I need you to be mad that it just like … happens.”
Reid writes scenes and dialogue with a contemporary lilt that feels deliberately styled for a screen adaptation, inflected throughout with cringe-inducing “holup holup”s and “ohmygod”s, heavy-handed attempts to mimic millennial parlance. Over all, the characters’ melodrama is unwarranted; the final climactic event that Alix thinks “felt like the plot twist of a horror movie” is actually quite predictable. But the simple prose and story line belie a more nuanced moral hierarchy: Emira is clearly the victim of racially motivated manipulation, but the two white people who profess to care for her shift uncomfortably between the poles of villain and hero. Both boss and boyfriend engage in distinct brands of white posturing, defining themselves in part by their relationships to this young woman — an adoring, vocationally lost black woman who must decide whether the benefits of those relationships are outweighed by the cost to her sense of self. Out of Reid’s often cloying vernacular, then, emerge some surprisingly resonant insights into the casual racism in everyday life, especially in the America of the liberal elite.
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December 31, 2019 at 05:00PM
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