Rebecca Makkai is the author of the novels The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and the story collection Music for Wartime. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Great Believers received an American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times. A 2022 Guggenheim fellow, Makkai is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is the artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives on the campus of the midwestern boarding school where her husband teaches, and in Vermont.
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie. But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn't as much of an outsider at Granby as she'd thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case. In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman's reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.
What I loved most about I Have Some Questions for You is how deeply we enter into Bodie Kane's head. And not only present day Bodie Kane, but also adolescent Bodie Kane, and the present day Bodie Kane of two separate "present days" (half of the book is told in 2018, the other half four years later). Makkai takes us through so many iterations of Bodie's psyche, and I felt like I could track how the Bodie of Granby grew to be the Bodie who came back. Not only that, but Bodie is so confident and sure of herself, even when she's not sure of the world around her—this becomes so evident because I started to believe everything Bodie was believing. Her blinders are so strong that it's so easy to feel like you're in her shoes exactly, and thus missing the exact same things as she is. Because of this, I felt like I had a good understanding of Bodie's flaws and her triumphs.
Bodie's story is told through 3 timelines, in a sense—as previously mentioned, the 2018 and 2022 storylines, but also the 1994/1995 timeline, of when Bodie is a teenager. Because of this, I felt that there were several details brought up and partly examined, but not looked at closely enough to feel satisfying. The main things I'm thinking of include the Twitter scandal with Bodie's partner Jerome, the next steps in 2022 following the big twist, and what really stopped any and all of those teens in 1995 from going to the police with more information. I felt like some of the details around the latter were hazy—there was seriously no nosy teen who went to the police with a big breaking detail? I wanted to know how Bodie's reputation also fell during the Twitter scandal, and what type of resolution Jasmine received. And, I felt rather unsatisfied by the ending. While it 100% reminded me of the first season of Serial, I wanted a clearer path forward for all of the characters. It makes sense to me that that might not have been possible, though, so I suppose what I wanted was a bit more of a commentary around why that was the case, and how we should feel about that.
I understand that not every book needs to make that type of commentary, but I certainly felt like Makkai had the writing chops for it, and I felt that she was halfway there already. I really enjoyed how the book was basically written as if to Mr. Bloch, as if Bodie were narrating this whole thing to him specifically, and how her narration was often separated by comments about nameless/faceless women in the news. I felt like that was working to show how misogynistic the world is, and worked to make a reader feel angry about how slowly the wheels of justice turn, and who they turn for, if they turn at all. The problem is, I was just left with so much anger, and didn't have a clear path forward with those emotions. As I type this, I'm still conflicted, because part of me still thinks that's a powerful way to end things, too. I guess I will just have to keep thinking on this (and maybe that's the point, too. Just to never forget that this is the way the world is).
I've seen great things about The Great Believers, and I've heard wonderful things about one of Makkai's short stories, so I don't think this is the end by any means of my reading of Makkai's work. Until then!
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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