I Have Some Questions For You – Rebecca Makkai

I Have Some Questions For You is one of those books that defies easy classification. Yes, it’s a literary mystery as it’s billed in the blurbs, but it’s also a coming-of-age novel. And it’s a dark academia novel, of sorts. And it’s a feminist text. And it’s a kind of subversion of the returning hero narrative. And it’s a bunch of other things in between.

The protagonist, Bodie, is a 40-year-old “sometime college professor with a lauded podcast”, returning to the New Hampshire boarding school where she spent her formative years to teach a short course on the art of podcasting. She narrates I Have Some Questions For You, addressing it to “you”, revealed early on to be the then-music teacher Mr Bloch.

In Bodie’s final year at the school, her former dormitory roommate was beaten and drowned, and the school’s sports trainer was convicted of her murder. Bodie has spent most of her adult years believing him to be the culprit, as the courts determined, but when she returns to the school and one of her students elects to investigate the case for podcast material, she’s forced to reckon with new evidence and question her own convictions.

The two timelines in I Have Some Questions For You (present day Bodie teaching the class, and high school Bodie experiencing the shock-waves of the crime) unfold simultaneously, as Bodie re-examines what happened back then and how it impacts the present. The story is also punctuated with chapters where Bodie imagines how the crime could have taken place, with different characters as perpetrators. On a surface level, you can read this as Bodie simply looking for the murder trifecta (means, motive, opportunity), but it’s also a nod to the genre convention of red herrings… and, on an even deeper level, it’s a commentary on just how at-risk young naive women are from violence. Any one of these “imagined” scenarios could plausibly have taken place, and that’s a whole other kind of scary.

Then, there’s a sudden time jump between Part 1 and Part 2 – almost like Makkai deliberately wanted to frustrate the reader’s expectations of a heart-racing denouement. Instead, she focuses our attention on its aftermath, showing us how the story doesn’t end with a Big Reveal.

Makkai weaves in other cases – real and fictional – of violence against women, in a number of forms, throughout I Have Some Questions For You. There’s semi-frequent allusions to cases covered in the news, or historical cases remembered by the narrator in passing (e.g., Lorena Bobbitt). There’s also a sub-plot where Bodie’s estranged husband is himself accused of exploiting his power over a young woman who worked in a gallery where his artwork was shown many years ago. Makkai specifically uses this latter example, I think, to show the nuances of grappling with the competing imperatives to believe all women on the one hand, and to think critically about where boundaries are drawn on the other.

I felt eerie echoes all through I Have Some Questions For You of my own time at boarding school. Granted, my school was in a regional Queensland town rather than the snowy woods of New England, and there were no gruesome murders on campus (that I heard about), but the social hierarchy and internal politics rang very true. In fact, it was so absolutely realistic that I mused more than once if I was reading: “if I hadn’t known this was a novel before I picked it up, I would have 100% assumed it was a non-fiction true crime book”.

So, true to that form of realism, I Have Some Questions For You doesn’t have a neat ending, nor does it have a happy one, but it does end on a pensive and tentatively optimistic note. I doubt that will satisfy readers of traditional mysteries (where justice is often served swiftly and only to a well-deserving party), but I liked it. Makkai offers us no black-and-white morality in this one; it’s right there in the title, she has some questions for you/us, and we for her.

Read I Have Some Questions For You on audiobook via Libro.fm here.

My favourite Amazon reviews of I Have Some Questions For You:

• “After reading all the glowing reviews, I have to assume the pages in my books were swapped in some sort of Tylenol Murders style literary caper, because this book was boring, bloated and deeply unsatisfying.” – MeanGreenZen
• “Didn’t need a lecture on how racist everyone is (but the perfect author) – a bunch of Ivy League snobbiness rolled into an average mystery – returned book for full refund after reading a few pages – if cancel culture and virtue signaling is your thing than this book is for you.” – LAZ