Review: 'I Have Some Questions for You,' by Rebecca Makkai

There is a sort of refrain that runs through "I Have Some Questions for You," lest we forget what the novel is really about. "It was the one where … " it begins, and what follows is a litany of crimes committed specifically against women: accusations, circumstances, men's myriad ways of ducking responsibility. Amid these instances of harassment and assault, many plucked from recent news, Rebecca Makkai spins a pertinent story that begins when the narrator, a podcaster named Bodie Kane, returns to the boarding school that she attended 20-some years earlier.

Bodie has come back to teach a two-week course in podcasting to a small group of students, one of whom wants to focus on a murder that occurred in Bodie's senior year. The culprit, this prospective podcaster suspects, was not the man who's been serving time in prison for the crime. The renewed focus on the case stirs memories for Bodie, who was briefly the murdered girl's roommate, and because of her minor role in the questionable rush to judgment that followed, pricks her conscience.

"I Have Some Questions for You" is, then, a mystery that proceeds on two intersecting tracks — the story of what happened 20 years ago, and the story of Bodie's and her students' pursuit of that complex and elusive truth — both filtered through the lens of Bodie's own experience then and now. Then, she was a Midwestern girl with a traumatic history trying to navigate a strange world of privilege, at once fraught and filled with promise.

Now, a confident and successful woman, she is working on an amicable divorce from an artist who is, coincidentally, caught up in a me-too moment when a younger artist accuses him of using his power and position to sexually manipulate her, creating an online firestorm that manages to scorch Bodie, too.

This might all sound somewhat programatic — and maybe it is — but it's also a damn good story in which what happens and what it's about bear equal narrative weight, subtly but inexorably forcing us to consider "the way everyone was just a body to be used, to be discarded — the way that if you had a body, they could grab you — if you had a body, they could destroy you."

Deviously twisting midway, as new and newly remembered information shifts Bodie's suspicions, the book is remarkably good at turning nuance to account and turning the abstractions of personal, social and cultural politics into a practical, deeply felt and occasionally even thrilling reality.

Ellen Akins is a Wisconsin-based writer and a teacher of writing.

I Have Some Questions for You
By: Rebecca Makkai.
Publisher: Viking, 436 pages, $28.