Blair's Reviews > I Have Some Questions For You

When I love a book, I sometimes find it very hard to write a review: I just want to scream incoherently about how great it is. When I hate a book, it can be equally difficult: I don’t want to waste energy on articulating my issues with it properly. It’s often the books in the grey areas in between that I find myself with the most to say about. I had a lot of problems with I Have Some Questions For You, but I also recognise that the fact I’m compelled to articulate them, examine them, is a form of praise, because this means I really want to engage with the book. I wanted to like it more than I do, and the following ‘review’ ought to be understood more as a series of notes in which I try to work through the reasons it didn’t work for me.

The narrator, Bodie Kane, is a successful podcaster in her early forties. As a teenager, she attended a prestigious boarding school, Granby, where she felt like an outsider. In their senior year, her popular roommate Thalia was murdered. The supposed killer – Omar, a young man who worked at the school as an athletic trainer – was convicted quickly, but the evidence was flimsy and there’s always been speculation about his guilt. When Bodie is invited back to the school to teach a course, she becomes newly obsessed with the case; through adult eyes, she sees something suspicious in Thalia’s close relationship with a music teacher. One of Bodie’s students decides to make her own podcast about Thalia’s death, opening up even more questions. Meanwhile, Bodie’s semi-estranged husband is accused of coercive behaviour by a younger ex-girlfriend, and her (Bodie’s) married lover seems to be growing distant. (Yes, there’s quite a lot going on.)

I was so looking forward to a version of the true-crime-podcast story from a writer as good as Rebecca Makkai, whose The Great Believers I adored, whose ‘The November Story’ is an all-time favourite. But I Have Some Questions For You is significantly undercooked as a thriller, and too overwhelmed by plot for it to be satisfying at the character development level. What it is, more than anything, is a #MeToo novel – a concept that seems baffling, dead in the water, in 2022, particularly after books like My Dark Vanessa and True Story have tackled similar subject matter so successfully.

There’s some value, I guess, in telling this type of story from the perspective of a watchful outsider, a person detached from the true harm, but frustratingly, the most interesting points thrown up by that are just not explored. There’s this moment where a woman, one of her former classmates, tells Bodie she was ‘safe’ from creepy adult men as a teen, with the obvious implication being that she (the younger Bodie) was too unattractive to be a target for them. And THAT’S interesting – both the idea itself, which is surely worth further discussion, and also the way this woman, who was a victim herself, so blithely throws it out there, assuming she’s right. Yet Bodie barely examines it!

Similarly, we’re shown how Bodie’s continuing attachment to her ‘outsider’ status leads her to place too much emphasis on what she endured at school – some bullying and mockery which, sure, is horrible, but hardly in the same league as being groomed by an abuser – while completely dismissing her husband’s accuser. The book never really gets into the hypocrisy of this. It’s like... we’re meant to see the irony, but nothing is done with it. Is this the whole point? That Bodie is a vulture, exploding the Thalia case to centre herself while ignoring situations in which she could truly make a positive impact? Certainly, the way Omar’s perspective is filtered through Bodie’s feels patronising. Almost the only way I can read the book favourably is to see Bodie as a (the?) villain, and though I’m sure she’s deliberately flawed, I doubt that’s the intention.

Bodie’s ruminations on how girls are conditioned to accept exploitation are not without merit, but they aren’t particularly fresh or interesting. My Dark Vanessa is so much more visceral; True Story achieves a more thought-provoking effect by varying its perspective and digging into how these stories get told; Death of a Bookseller and the Six Stories books engage more productively with questions around the ethics of true crime. Here, every seemingly intriguing idea is flattened into a hackneyed ‘There Is A Lot Of Misogyny’ message achieved through methods like the recital of a litany of faceless/nameless victims alongside details of what happened to them (a device I really cannot stand), or the anodyne horror of an adult woman realising that yes, a teacher sleeping with teenagers is Bad (who would have thought!!)

A lot of my problems with this book boil down to the fact that it feels like it is trying to Say Something, and what it is trying to Say is so stale, and – I realise this is completely unfair – what I wanted from Makkai was another meaty literary novel with some expansive subplot that shouldn’t be fascinating but is, like the art bequest thing in The Great Believers. There is a real art to writing a compelling crime/thriller narrative, and this is never more apparent than when a talented author of literary fiction doesn’t quite pull it off. This is not a bad book – it’s too well-written to be bad – but I think what I’ll remember about it is my frustration over the most promising parts of the narrative being squandered.

I received an advance review copy of I Have Some Questions for You from the publisher through Edelweiss.

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