Rebecca Makkai’s new novel, I Have Some Questions for You, begins with a darkish joke. The narrator is recounting conversations with strangers in regards to the podcast she’s making, a Serial-style exploration of the homicide of a woman at an elite boarding faculty within the ’90s. “Wasn’t that the one the place the man stored her within the basement?” they generally ask. “Wasn’t it the one the place she was stabbed in—no. The one the place she received in a cab with—totally different lady. The one the place she went to the frat celebration …” The punch line isn’t simply that violence in opposition to girls has grow to be so ubiquitous that the victims blur in our minds; it’s that the tales we inform about them have grow to be fully formulaic—and we devour them anyway. The narrator goes on to vow us a very well-worn true-crime story, conscious of each its attract and its shortcomings: “It was the one the place she was younger sufficient and white sufficient and fairly sufficient and wealthy sufficient that folks paid consideration.” In simply a few pages, Makkai units up the difficult, meta enterprise of her fourth novel: working inside a style that she approaches with skepticism.
Doubts in regards to the style additionally bother her narrator. Bodie Kane, a 40-year-old movie professor and lauded podcaster, returns in 2018 to Granby, the ritzy New Hampshire boarding faculty she attended within the ’90s, to show a pair of brief programs—and “to measure myself in opposition to the lady who slouched her method via Granby.” As an chubby teen from small-town Indiana, she’d wearing all black and clung to the shadows as a stage supervisor for the theater program. A few many years later, she finds that the present-day college students forged her teen self and the mores of that period into stark reduction.
The keen Gen Zers in Bodie’s podcasting seminar appear to have pole-vaulted over the awkward-teen section. All of them share their pronouns, one lady talks brazenly about scientific melancholy, and two of them debate which tales are theirs to inform. After the primary class, a woman named Britt approaches Bodie to debate the challenge she’d wish to pursue: the grisly 1995 homicide of a Granby senior named Thalia Keith. Britt is earnest, reciting the “problematic” elements of the true-crime style as they apply to this case—she fears that by specializing in a white lady’s homicide, she could be “ignoring the violence accomplished to Black and brown our bodies.” However she has a social-justice angle: She’s satisfied that Omar Evans, the college’s younger Black athletic coach imprisoned for the crime, was the sufferer of racist policing.
Bodie is struck by how way more clued in Britt is than she was at that age: Again then, she’d merely considered Omar’s conviction on largely circumstantial proof as “odd.” But she can be nicely conscious that Britt, hoping to not be simply “one other white lady laughing about homicide,” is simply one other lady captivated by a well-recognized true-crime plotline. Not that Bodie is about to discourage her scholar—she herself is wildly curious, having been Thalia’s roommate and having spent numerous hours over time spelunking Reddit boards dedicated to the case.
I Have Some Questions for You appears at first look like a retreat for Makkai, whose earlier novel, The Nice Believers, was an excellent and bold chronicle of the AIDS epidemic. Following a bunch of homosexual males in Chicago within the Nineteen Eighties and deftly interweaving plots from totally different time intervals, Makkai captured the scourge’s devastating long-term repercussions in a metropolis given far much less consideration than both Los Angeles or New York. But look once more, and I Have Some Questions for You, too, tackles large social convulsions that elevate questions on reminiscence, and about how we assign blame. However this time, coaching a cautious eye on our true-crime obsession and on #MeToo revelations, Makkai conveys much less confidence that we have now helpful technique of excavating and telling the tales that hang-out us. The novel’s dizzying tour of tweets and headlines and podcast sound bites leaves us unmoored even because it has us hooked—and that’s exactly the purpose.
As Bodie tries to recall the occasions surrounding Thalia’s homicide, different components of her previous bubble up, and the guide takes a #MeToo flip. Like so many ladies did in early 2018, Bodie resurrects reminiscences from way back, now “ their ugly backsides, the filthy sides lengthy hidden.” She fumes on the sexist remedy she and different women had been anticipated to snicker off—being groped, being made the punch line of crude jokes. The overly acquainted method of a beloved music instructor, she reluctantly acknowledges, was grooming, and the boys’ recreation of “Thalia Bingo” was harassment. (It concerned “a sheet on which they may preliminary squares that mentioned issues like touched exterior garments, or beneath garments above waste … or requested out, or fucked.”) Her newly attuned imaginative and prescient reminds her of the primary time she placed on glasses “and regarded in marvel on the bushes, and felt inexplicably betrayed. These clearly delineated leaves had been there all alongside, and nobody ever instructed me.”
However earlier than lengthy, Bodie begins to have doubts about her new vantage. Conscious that her reminiscences aren’t providing the total image, she resorts to a sort of kaleidoscopic fantasy; in pulpy chapters scattered all through the novel, she imagines how numerous individuals—her friends, a instructor, even she herself—would have killed Thalia, and why. She hopes Britt’s podcast will fill in a number of the blanks, conscious although she (typically) is of the slippery method that tales can grow to be substitutes for reality: “I wished Britt to take me there. I wished second sight. I wished the power to recollect issues I used to be by no means there for.”
Right here, Makkai begins to toy with an pressing query for a society steeped in true-crime and #MeToo narratives: Ought to we consider the previous by the requirements of right this moment? In lieu of a solution, she calls consideration to the inadequacy of the storytelling modes we rely on. Determined to know who killed Thalia, Bodie falls for a formulation that she cautioned her podcasting college students in opposition to: intruding with new theories too quickly relatively than exploring questions. Seen via the veil of Thalia’s homicide, all previous male misbehavior takes on a extra sinister form for Bodie, and he or she clings stubbornly to the thought of 1 predatory man because the perpetrator. Even when she’s proved improper, she will be able to’t cease seeing guilt spreading broadly.
When confronted with drama nearer to residence, her imaginative and prescient shifts. After her husband, Jerome, is attacked on-line for a murky scenario involving a long-ago girlfriend, Bodie all of a sudden turns into way more all for making distinctions amongst numerous harms in opposition to girls. (On the time, Jasmine was a 21-year-old gallery assistant, and Jerome was a painter in his mid-30s; since then, she’s grow to be a efficiency artist, and asserts in a bit that he wielded his energy in discomfiting methods.) Now Bodie applies inflexible bounds to a #MeToo declare. Drunk within the bathtub, she takes to Twitter to blast the net mobs for equating shitty habits with “ACTUAL sexual assault,” for suggesting {that a} grown lady lacks sexual company. Offline, she admits to being extra conflicted—and never nearly Jerome: “I now not had any sense of what was true … I couldn’t work out who knew extra about what occurred to Thalia: me now, or me at barely eighteen.”
Makkai isn’t right here to adjudicate, however to complicate. She juxtaposes examples and leaves it to us to attract connections and comparisons like detectives layering purple string on an proof board. Bodie sees a line between the Twitter mobs and the true-crime obsessives—each are “inserting themselves into another person’s story,” their voyeurism infused with zeal to apportion blame and ship some type of justice. Crucially, these true-crime followers and #MeToo spectators aren’t merely passive shoppers. They’ve the ability to change lives, typically in excessive methods: Jerome is tweeted out of a job; a later, more-polished iteration of Britt’s podcast prompts a reappraisal of Omar’s conviction, and Bodie’s sleuthing influences what occurs in courtroom.
As we race via the novel, we’re pulled into taking part in a lot the identical position as Bodie does: making an attempt to piece collectively the varied tales, eagerly awaiting a verdict. We’re all however certain who did it by the tip, however Makkai denies us the satisfaction of a confession or of justice cleanly served. As an alternative, she leaves us to fill within the gaps, to conjure the lurid particulars from scraps and rumors—trapped in a quest, her agile guide reminds us, that ought to at all times depart us second-guessing.
By Rebecca Makkai
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