“NOT A SINGLE CELL of his body was the same as it had been in 1995. But he was still himself, just as I was still, despite everything, my teenage self. I had grown over her like rings around the core of a tree, but she was still there.” This reflection is from Bodie Kane, the narrator of Rebecca Makkai’s latest novel, I Have Some Questions for You. The quote captures the ethos of this story in which the main character recalls her past with both urgency and emotional clarity.
Bodie Kane is an LA-based podcaster who has come to teach a mini-mester at Granby, the New Hampshire boarding school she attended for high school. Her students become interested in the case of Thalia Keith — Bodie’s old roommate, who was murdered at Granby when they were both students.
“I think the wrong guy is in prison,” says Bodie’s student Britt — a conviction Bodie comes to share.
I Have Some Questions for You is a compulsive page-turner that isn’t just a murder mystery. It’s also an exploration of racism. Omar Evans is the Black man who went to prison for Thalia’s murder. The former athletic trainer for Granby, Omar was convicted with spotty evidence and a convoluted police theory. When Omar is asked whether he blames Granby, he reflects, “I think Granby leaned hard on the police to solve this, and they leaned hard on them not to look too close at the teachers and students ... I don’t think any one person said, ‘Let’s pin it on Omar.’ But you lean that hard on people, they’ll hand you what you want. What they wanted was someone like me.”
Perhaps more than anything, I Have Some Questions for You is a reflection on the horror, pervasiveness, and many faces of misogyny. Bodie muses, “I thought of a friend in LA who’d said recently, of her own daughter, ‘It feels wrong to give her all this happiness and confidence when we know what’s coming ... It feels like fattening a pig for slaughter.’ But what was the alternative? Starving the pig?”
I Have Some Questions for You is not a spiritual book, but it pushed me to reflect on how Christian hegemony shapes our perception of people in power. While adult Bodie is savvier than teen Bodie, she still has a major blind spot — the way she recalls a favorite teacher from her youth. Slowly, Bodie’s old perception of her teacher unravels, but I wondered why that part of her journey took so long. That train of thought took me to the memory of a worship song I sang as a teenager.
“All powerful!” went the chorus. I would sing it full of fervor for a God whose power and goodness were tied together in my mind, until the two things became practically synonymous. Looking back, I wondered: Does the very notion of a powerful, creator God prep us to see people in authority as good, regardless of whether they are?
I Have Some Questions for You reminds us to interrogate what we thought we knew. “Just because you can’t picture someone doing something doesn’t mean they’re not capable of it,” Bodie says. She finds that people she once liked are capable of atrocities. But she also finds that some of the villains of her past are capable of compassion — just as Bodie is, in the act of looking again.
Caroline McTeer is a San Diego-based writer and has been published in Sojourners, The Bitter Southerner, Litro, and elsewhere.
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