March 17, 2023

I Have Some Questions for You, by Rebecca Makkai

There were some moments in which I felt, reading I Have Some Questions for You, that perhaps Rebcca Makkai was trying to squeeze too much into this book. A novel 400+ pages long, a campus novel, murder mystery, #MeToo/cancel culture moral reckoning, Anti-Black racism and how the justice system is far from just for people of colour. Plus a treatise on true crime podcasts, because Mekkai’s narrator Bodie Kane is a podcaster too, in addition to being a film professor, and she casually rattles off old crime cases: “Wasn’t it the one where she was stabbed in—no. The one where she got in a cab with—different girl. There one where she went to the frat party, the one where he used a stick, the one where he used a hammer…” A story that’s specific and unspecific at once, positively amorpheous.

The specific part of the story is about Bodie returning to the scene of the crime in 2018, which is to say high school, which was, in her case, a mid-grade New Hampshire boarding school she’d been sent to in the 1990s by a benefactor after horrific tragedy had befallen her family in Indiana. Those years were, as high school always is, complicated, Bodie conscious of herself as an outsider, and then, in her senior year, her roommate from the year before is murdered. The school’s athletic assistant was found guilty, and he also happened to be one of the few Black people on campus. By 2018 and deeply steeped in true crime podcasts, Bodie is already mildly obsessed the case as she comes back to Granby to teach seminars on podcasting and film history.

At the same time, her husband (they’re separated; he lives next door/ they get along fine) is being cancelled on Twitter by a somewhat insufferable performance artist, and Bodie is slowly being undone by the complexity of these matters: what is the distance between what her ex is alleged to have done and other instances the prompted us all to #BelieveWomen, plus the absolute bullshit she and her peers had to put up with with in high school from male teachers, and even from each other as rumours spread (but then some of these rumours are what protected students from abusers—how do you ever know what/which women to believe?).

It’s been a busy week and I’ve not had as much time to read this book as I would have liked, to give it the focus it really deserved, so that I could get lost in it, but last night I sat down for a couple of hours to finish it and finally everything clicked, the over-stuffedness, the real answer to whodunnit:

“My point is, you were part of the machine… You drove the getaway car. You threw bricks through the window and someone else grabbed the jewelry. You distracted the feds while the spies got away You held her down while someone else beat her. You shot the deer and wounded it; when the second hunter came along, the deer could no longer run.”

What a marvelous, absorbing, complicated world of a book this is, a literary mystery, and a mirror.