Book review: I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai

By Simon Demetriou

Have you heard the one about the dead girl?

In I Have Some Questions for You, the words ‘It was the one’ ring out, over and over again: ‘It was the one where the harasser ended up on the Supreme Court…The one where the judge said the swimmer was so promising. The one where the rapist reminded the judge of himself as a young rapist.’ By referring with bludgeoning repetitiveness to instances of violence against women in terms so often used to introduce jokes, Rebecca Makkai confronts the reader with the central concern of her novel: crimes against women, which happen with such terrifying frequency, have become fodder for entertainment.

This problem underlies the frame and action of I Have Some Questions for You, in which Bodie Kane – ‘a sometime college professor with a lauded podcast’ about female exploitation in the film industry – goes back to Granby, the remote New Hampshire boarding school she attended as a girl, and immediately begins revisiting the murder of Thalia Keith, her junior year roommate. The pretext for revisiting the murder? Bodie is teaching a special elective class on podcasting, and suggests the murder as a potential topic, which is eagerly jumped on by one, then two, of her students. Needless to say, this murder gets its own flippant definition: ‘It was the one where she was young enough and white enough and pretty enough and rich enough that people paid attention.’

So, we’ve got a podcaster who rails against female exploitation, encouraging and participating in a podcast in which the death of a girl is used for entertainment. At the same time, it’s 2018, a critical moment in the #MeToo movement, in which the critical re-examination of memory seemed an ethical imperative. To get to the bottom of Thalia’s murder, Bodie has to reconstruct and reappraise her memories of Granby – in particular those of her favourite teacher, Denny Bloch. He turns out to be the ‘you’ of the novel’s title, and he also turns out to have been a sexual predator. But does that make him the killer?

In the end, the novel’s triumph lies in its ambivalence. The podcast produces morally positive results, but it cannot help being exploitative of the voiceless people – the dead girl and the black inmate found guilty of Thalia’s murder two decades earlier – it purports to be acting for. Nobody’s motives are selfless and nothing ultimately gets resolved. The one certainty is that while Bodie’s best friend, Fran, believes that ‘Life isn’t that messy if you stay away from mess’, to do so means turning a blind eye to the very things that most need to be seen. Embrace the mess.