Meike's Reviews > I Have Some Questions For You

Wrapped up in a murder mystery at a prestigious New England boarding school, Makkai's new novel revolves around the topic of femicide while at the same time questioning standards of wokeness and tackling cancel culture - and I really enjoyed how she plays with classic genre writing (think The Secret History) and current phenomena to ponder social justice. Our protagonist is 40-ish podcaster Bodie Kane who lives next door to her husband: The couple has separated, but they are still good friends with occasional benefits and raise two young children together (how zeitgeisty do you want your main character to be? YES.). When Bodie takes up a temporary teaching job at Granby, the elite boarding school in New Hamsphire she herself attended, she once again gets wrapped up in the murder case concerning her late roommate, beautiful (and white, and rich) Thalia Keith, who was killed in 1995.

When Bodie and the students who attend her class dive into the investigation of Thalia's murder in order to produce a podcast on the matter, they become more and more convinced that the man who has already spent over 20 years in prison for the deed is innocent - the Black athletics coach was simply the one who best fit the desired narrative. It becomes clear that the person who is repeatedly directly addressed in the novel - the whole text reads like a long letter to him - is a prime suspect who has never been investigated: The music teacher. What did the students back then know, and why didn't they speak up, helping the man who went to jail and pointing out the factors that seemed dubious? What role did the social climate play, what responsibility do they carry individually?

Questions of changing awareness, but also agency and responsibility are underlined by the second plotline that alternates with the first one: Bodie's husband Jerome, an artist, gets canceled on twitter because years ago, when he was in his thirties, he had a consensual relationship with a 21-year-old employee of the gallery he was working with, which also leads to Bodie being attacked online. Will Bodie and Jerome lose everything over a legal relationship that went sour a long time ago?

When the apparently contrasting plotlines start to merge, the story becomes a real pageturner: Suddenly, Bodie and her investigative team have the possibility to use the online community that chased Jerome to chase the man they deem guilty...

Makkai uses her story to ponder framing, narratives, and preconceptions - what better place to illuminate the repercussions of how stories are crafted than in literary fiction? Young Bodie was an outsider at Granby who has lived through trauma and didn't have the status and habitus of the other students - Makkai shows the social dynamics at play, between classes and genders. The same goes for the discussion about Jerome, the husband - here, Makkai asks uncomfortable questions about the instrumentalization of victim narratives in order to gain status and attention. The whole thing is intercut with scenes from the film class Bodie also teaches at Granby, where students learn how to see and interpret images while considering the power of montage (I also had to watch all the films mentioned in college and got flashbacks! :-)). Talking about montage, Makkai has also inserted several references to real-life femicides, raising awareness on how they are perceived and what that means.

So sure, Makkai has once more written a novel that is unreasonably long for what it has to say, but she has also once more written a text that tackles highly relevant topics in a clever way, challenging our preconceptions and underlining the complexity of the real world - plus it's super entertaining. The protagonist, Bodie, is an imperfect, messy, complicated woman, and that's the kind of female character I want to meet on the page (please note how she is not at all defined by her role as a mother). This book will be quite the challenge for people longing for literature that tells them what to think, and what's not to love about that? Certainly, the title "I Have Some Questions For You" does refer to the suspect who is directly addressed in the text, but it is also printed on the cover which is directed towards: The readers.

If this becomes a bestseller and wins some prizes, I'm all here for it.

Book discussion on Papierstau Podcast (in German): https://papierstaupodcast.de/allgemei...