Interview With a Book: "I Have Some Questions For You"
Let's talk about Rebecca Makkai's buzzy new literary novel.
Welcome to our new column “Interview With a Book,” where we occasionally review novels we’ve been reading. If you’re new to Dear Fiction, we’re so happy you’re here! To our devoted readers, welcome back.
It’s few and far between that I read a book that keeps me up reading past midnight. Just one more page, I’ll say. To which I guzzle down another chapter. Rebecca Makkai’s boarding school mystery novel, I Have Some Questions For You, was that book. I was completely smitten with this novel, but of course, it wasn’t perfect. Here’s my unconventional review.
Sum it up in two sentences: A successful film professor and true crime podcaster named Bodie Kane returns to Granby, the New Hampshire boarding school she graduated from in 1995, where she’s forced to reckon with the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith. Not only does new evidence emerge about the case while she’s teaching, raising the question if local officials blamed the only African American faculty member too quickly, but after Bodie applies her #MeToo perspective to what she remembers, the case (and everyone’s collective memory of what really happened) is seen an entirely new light.
Critics who said it best: The San Francisco Chronicle’s description of the novel as "part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age” is spot on, but I also loved People’s take: “A twisty, immersive whodunit perfect for fans of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History.” Yes, yes, yes!
What I liked best: This isn’t just a novel, it’s a deep dive into how much sexual politics have changed from the 1990s. You can’t stop thinking about your own experiences while reading. I finished it on vacation while sharing a house with my best friend from high school who then read it, too. We both graduated at the same time that the book is set, and she’d plop down in a lounge chair every so often next to me and say things like: Do you think this happened in our school? Because murder aside, so much of the gray areas between male teachers and female students depicted in the book felt very familiar. Interactions that seemed fairly innocent at the time now suggested more ominous possibilities.
Comic Relief: Bodie’s character is a mother, but she leaves her kids with her ex-husband in Los Angeles while she’s teaching the three week course. There are multiple times in the novel where Bodie is asked: “Who is babysitting your kids?” It’s a question women professionals get all of the time, and Makkai said in an interview she was asked it on tour 40 times in a few days. Why don’t men get that question when they’re traveling? Honestly, it’s so relatable that I laughed out loud when it kept happening.
Creep Factor: The narrator is telling the story to someone who she calls “you,” and during the first quarter of the book, you’re not sure who she’s speaking to. When it becomes clear who “you” is, you can’t help but feel a tingle up my spine. I don’t want to spoil it for you, so I won’t say more, but it’s a big reveal.
Historical artifacts relived in the book: Nirvana and Kurt Cobain’s suicide is explored in excerpts of letters. There’s the mention of drinking Zimas (remember those?!), Monty Python movies, and a 35 mm camera’s developed photos where the red eyes are overexposed. Remember that? It was definitely fun to go back to historical 1990s with Makkai’s wry sensibility.
Lines that got to me most: To make her point about how many women come forward to an accuser only to be silenced, Makkai has these moments at several points in the novel where she says things like, “It was the story that got told and retold. It was the one where she was young enough and white enough and pretty enough and rich enough that people paid attention. It was the one where we were all young enough to think that someone smarter had all of the answers.” The examples though get more and more graphic, pulled directly from headlines, as the book goes on, and the idea that there are so many horrible stories about women being sexually abused or assaulted that we confuse them, terrorizes the reader.
Favorite Makkai quote in an interview: I was listening to her in an interview on a podcast the other day, and the interviewer asked her about how she portrayed Bodie as a mother and her impending divorce from her ex-husband Jerome. (It is a conscious uncoupling in the book.)
Says Makkai: “I wanted to unapologetically show a woman who is a mother and she’s away from her kids and it’s fine. She’s divorced and it’s not upending her life. Because those are the people I know. That’s real. As authors, out of fear of being judged by other women, we feel like we have to bend over backwards to show that someone is a good mother. Bodie is a good mother but she’s not with her kids right now and you’re going to have to deal.”
I found that really telling because as I was reading it kept bothering me that she didn’t miss her kids more; it wasn’t that she was away from them. It was that she seemed to block them out of her head entirely and that felt unrealistic to me, so it was fascinating to see why Makkai made that decision.
The downside: The novel can come across as a bit preachy at times with Makkai’s very obvious opinions seeming to seep through the pages. What she’s doing is framing the story through a political lens, and that’s part of the point of the story — to talk about the way in which a story is told and remembered and then retold through Twitter mobs, etc. At times, though, I felt like it veered away from the story too much, getting lost in a rabbit hole of social media and online accusations, assumptions and stereotyping, the line between what’s real harassment and what’s questionable. The book was strong enough without all of that noise clouding the storyline.
That’s all, folks! If you read I Have Some Questions For You, please let me know what you think. The novel has a 3.9 on GoodReads, which I found shocking — I think this novel has the potential to win the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award. The Great Believers, her last novel, was shortlisted for both.
Great review Brooke and I'm going to love the "interview with a book" series. It's been on my TBR since before it published, but your review has convined me to move it closer to the top. Thanks!