Booker Longlist #3: Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid

Sometimes it is best to have low expectations for a book so that when you get to it you can be

pleasantly surprised. That was definitely the case with my experience reading Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid, a book that has been, in my opinion, unfairly maligned for daring to be longlisted for the Booker Prize. A more commercial and straightforward novel, championed by the likes of Reese Witherspoon, many were gobsmacked why a book with such pedestrian prose, a beach read of sorts, could supplant the likes of Hamnet or Utopian Avenue and compete for an award known for embracing experimental and edgy works of fiction.

Such A Fun Age begins with an upsetting encounter. Our central protagonist, a twenty-five-year-old African American woman, Emira, has taken a child she babysits to a local grocery store. While there, she is accused by another customer and security guard of kidnapping the child and is forced to call the parents to recuse herself from the situation. So begins a captivating story that jumps back and forth between Emira and the child’s white mother, Alix. The latter is eager to make things right after the encounter, embracing Emira in often cringy, protective and patronizing ways. Emira, on the other hand, focuses on navigating the various white-spaces that make up her life, always figuring out how to respond to the white characters in those spaces who make assumptions about who she is and what she wants. Although Alix’s awkward attempts to befriend Emira beyond the employment relationship remain uncomfortable, they are totally thrown off when a common person in their lives means that past secrets of Alix’s past threaten to undermine the image she has created as a progressive liberal professional.

Although Such a Fun Age is an unlikely choice to be longlisted for the Booker and is unlikely to win, it nonetheless impressed me, both with how it dealt with timely and relevant issues (maybe the most zeitgisty book of the longlist) and how captivating it was to read (or in this case I listened to the excellent audiobook). It certainly is a more accessible commercial novel. The prose is breezy in a summer beach read kind of way, but it does not stop Reid from taking on important themes about the African American experience.

The book was released on the last day of 2019, before George Floyd, before the term “Karen” became ubiquitous, and before American society and beyond began the American self-reflection about how white privilege and racism play themselves out in the experiences of ordinary people. In this sense, Such A Fun Age accidently feels incredibly on the nose for what’s going on in the United States right now, but it also speaks to the reality of African American experiences navigating “white spaces” that is more than just a 2020 phenomena.

Reid’s debut novel may not do everything perfectly, but for me it has captured this experience in profound ways, giving us a relatively banal, ordinary, likeable protagonist who must every day perform her acceptable “Blackness” in these white spaces, who must internally process but externally ignore minor and major mircoraggressions that her white employer and boyfriend don’t even recognize as problematic, who must choose whether to affirm her agency or not, knowing that doing so carries risks and repercussions that the white characters will never understand.

Whether this book is everyone’s cup of tea (clearly it’s not), I’m personally happy it made the longlist. It is a book of the moment, an important book, a book that has been and will be widely read. Looking forward to having deeper conversations in the next two months about the merits of the pages Reid has created.