Kiley Reid’s Timely “Such a Fun Age” Subverts the White Savior Narrative
Whenever my best friend comes to town, she arrives with a suitcase overflowing with books, which she treats as an excuse to rearrange my bookshelves. I stand back and admire her handiwork, promising to read the volumes she highlights and inevitably picking up the pulpier fare.
“Clear a Saturday. This book dresses its literary fiction like it’s Ocean’s Eleven.”
I laughed and swore to prioritize it, and for once, I kept my promise. She wasn’t lying.
Kiley Reid’s biting and incisive Such a Fun Age scrutinizes the relationship between Alix Chamberlain, a wealthy white feminist who transformed her blog into a lucrative personal brand, and her part-time babysitter, Emira Tucker, a twenty-five-year-old graduate from Temple University, anxious about losing her parents’ health insurance. The novel opens one night when Emira, asked to work unexpectedly, takes her charge to a nearby grocery store in the Chamberlain’s affluent neighborhood and is accused of kidnapping by an indignant white security guard. The opening chapters ignite like a viral moment, and the pace never slows.
I tend to read several books simultaneously, finishing something haphazardly after intermittent bouts of inattention. I binged this book in eighteen hours, falling asleep as the sun rose only to anxiously pick it back up over what was now my mid-afternoon coffee.
Such a Fun Age displays an impeccable understanding of narrative tension. Reid alternates between the perspectives of her two leads, unveiling the small hopes and worries they carry in the relationship between them. She suggests small moments of white empathy that she later undercuts with necessary black reticence. As Alix presses for a closer relationship, Emira explains why she pulls back. Reid’s characters lie to one another, and she reveals those lies at devastating and inopportune times.
Reid also fills Emira’s story with lively women of color that serve as an all-too-necessary support system. Each works toward unique professional ends, and each encourages Emira as she grapples with her own uncertainty about her career goals. Although at times the variety of voices in the book confused me , I found that occurred predominantly in conversations with multiple individuals, and at no point did my enjoyment of this novel diminish. Rather, I greatly appreciated Reid’s willingness to show her readers so many close relationships between women of color.
Too often, white storytellers congratulate white characters for the slightest signs of growth. Driving Miss Daisy, Green Book, and Crash suggest white characters can change if approached sympathetically by a kindhearted hired hand. As a woman of color, Reid refuses this racist trope and plays with memory so astutely that all white readers will be left asking themselves how they play the unsuspecting villain in their own lives. Undoubtedly, Such a Fun Age shines brightest when it undermines and interrogates this specter of the white redemption narrative, and I’m already pressing my copy into the hands of everyone I know.
Such a Fun Age goes on sale December 31st and is available for preorder now.
