When this book is rolling, it’s a really good book. When it stops to pause to consider how good of a book it is, it comes off as pretentious.
I know that sounds ridiculous but that’s how this one made me feel. It took me multiple tries to get into this one but I kept coming back to it as I knew eventually I’d catch on to what Makkai is doing. And once I did, I mostly enjoyed the ride.
This one is best read as satire, almost adjacent to Tár but not really. I thought there’d be more of a tell-tale heart vibe but Makkai instead has her main character tell the whole story to a nameless, faceless professor she slept with years ago. Said professor may or may not have been involved in the murder of a student and now that the MC is back — and a famous true crime podcast host at that — she’s being pushed by a student on what actually happened that night.
I Have Some Questions For You delves headfirst into the #MeToo aspect of it all: a Gen Xer trying to understand why millennials are so mad about the misadventures of men, using the worst possible apparatus (twitter) to do so. She cannot relate to her students, she’s wary around her colleagues and ex-classmates, and generally doesn’t seem to have a fit in the world.
That would make her a quality complex character if not for Makkai’s inconsistencies: she had a traumatic childhood but never returns to the well often. She does a true crime podcast on murdered women but brushes off the obvious transference with her own collegiate past. She wants to protect the professor but maybe not, their relationship is only explored through the MC’s perspective.
Now a fan of this book would say: A-ha! That’s what Makkai wants you to think! That’s the genius of it. And that’s where I think the book shies of greatness: the MC (I’m writing this and I just remembered her name is Bodie) has layers to her past but in an attempt to make them mysterious, it just feels like deflection. Bodie isn’t interested in introspection but the book takes place entirely from her perspective, which I admire the audacity of it but it doesn’t make her as interesting as I’m supposed to take her.
This is best read as satire. The moment where Bodie is flamed on Twitter for talking down to a woman of color…only for the woman to be revealed as 1/8th Bolivian…only for people to come online to defend her…is hilarious and grimly perfect for the post-#MeToo era where an inability to take the very real existence of white supremacist patriarchal violence and understand it without its vernacular being the purview of Too Online Academic/Activist Speak stifled the movement. Makkai gets that perfectly and sadly, given the moment we are in, this is the book for it.
Makkai does a good job futzing with reader expectations. It’s up to you to decide how well you felt the subversion works.