Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid – witty take on class and race in America
At the heart of Kiley Reid’s debut novel Such A Fun Age (2020) is a moment you feel like you’ve watched, horrified, on viral shaky iPhone footage: a black babysitter is accused of kidnapping the white child she is looking after by a supermarket security worker. But this is fiction, and Reid is interested in the toxic racial dynamics of modern America, and so much more.
Such A Fun Age follows a brief period in the life of Emira – a recent English graduate struggling to find a job she feels passionate about that also pays enough for health insurance – and Alix Chamberlain, a sort of proto-influencer who makes a living from writing to companies asking for free products. Alix’s family have recently moved from New York to Philadelphia, and Emira is Alix’s babysitter for her two children, Briar and Catherine. In a pre-Hillary, pre-Trump 2015 America, these two women negotiate the prickly intricacies of race, class, wealth, and female friendship in a novel which inexorably builds towards a revelation which will permanently divide them.
Reid is adept at depicting complex, precarious relationships. She delicately portrays the love Emira has for Briar – Alix’s oldest daughter – and gives this quasi-maternal role attention and significance it is typically denied. The emotional intensity between Emira and Briar is partly a by-product of Alix’s own, more distanced relationship with her daughter. Through their relationship, Reid is able to question what it is to be a mother, and what it is to love a child. It is perhaps only Emira and Briar’s bond which is able to transcend the racial politics of the novel, but this freedom is partial: Briar is young – Emira herself worries how she will grow up – and whilst Emira does love Briar, she is paid to do so the whole time.
Reid revels in intense female friendship. Emira and Alix are a part of realistic, flawed, wonderful, and racially diverse groups of friends. Both women are a part of a group of four: the two sets mirror each other, highlighting their differences in wealth, age, jobs, and location. Alix’s friends are all Manhattanites with children and various high-powered jobs. Emira’s friends are millennial Philadelphia 20-somethings with various degrees of fulfilling and unfulfilling jobs who celebrate each success and birthday with nights out. Both groups communicate relentlessly via group chats; Reid aptly depicts the immediacy and vitality of such a modern medium of communication. The balance of these two groups of friends reveals more similarities than differences: while the women may be at very different stages in life, they deal with similar issues, and give as much awful advice as they do good.
Such A Fun Age’s racial politics feels real and emotional: Emira is the victim of racist profiling at the beginning of the novel, the whole of which is filmed by a white man desperate to display his ally, woke credentials. This film is then leaked by Alix in a desperate attempt to have a chance to ‘save’ Emira and use her influence to generate good publicity. It is not until the last fifty pages of the novel that Emira is granted any real agency over what happened to her, and her actions cost her. Reid’s skill lies in creating a plot in which Emira is so evidently the victim of racial abuse, but much of the harm in the later stages of the novel comes from characters with a misguided, white-saviour-complex-esque notion of trying to help her. Near the end of the novel, Alix cries ‘All of this was for you!’.
And yet, despite the complexity of Reid’s depiction of racial politics and the interaction between race and privilege, Reid does occasionally slip into a social-science type of lexis. At one moment she describes how black people are continually ‘othered’. This is true, and Reid’s novel expends much energy in demonstrating it. Yet, in a novel which does so much nuanced showing rather than telling, this momentary slip feels all the more out of place. It feels wrong to criticise, as Reid is only telling her readers something that is without a doubt true in modern America, but it breaks the novel’s frame into a discussion about itself, rather than continuing the narrative.
Such A Fun Age is an apt title in multiple ways; its heavy irony highlights a distinct lack of progress in America’s racial politics since Obama’s election in 2008. But it also alludes to the fact that the moment this novel is set in – the early phases of the election race in 2015 – is different to its time of publication. Hillary and her campaign make cameo appearances throughout the novel, and the rupture between Alix and Emira happens just as the 2016 election occurs. Reid is writing from a significantly less fun age for black Americans.
Many critics have compared Reid’s debut to Sally Rooney’s breakout two novels Conversations With Friends (2017) and Normal People (2018). The similarities are manifold: both writers unpick female friendship, class, and privilege, and do so in an unapologetically modern world. But to see Reid’s writing only in comparison to Rooney’s is surely to miss the point of her debut novel: while both writers deal with similar issues, Reid’s novel is saturated in the dynamics of race, and at its very heart is a resistance to a need for black women to be elevated – even through comparison – by white women.