Whodunit fueled by feminist rage
Rebecca Makkai’s “I Have Some Questions for You” is a sleekly plotted literary murder mystery that has garnered rave reviews and seems destined to be turned into a Netflix miniseries.
Makkai, a lyrical writer whose last book was the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist “The Great Believers,” has gone all in on plot with intricate twists (the novel feels about 100 pages too long) and a major red herring. But most of the characters are straight out of central casting: rumpled teachers, rich and spoiled preppies, and at the center, the problematic narrator, Bodie Kane, who describes herself as a “sometime college professor with a lauded podcast, a woman who could make a meal from farmers market ingredients.”
When the novel begins, Bodie has been invited back to the elite New England boarding school she attended in the 1990s as a scholarship student to teach a course on podcasting. Vaguely troubled by the murder of a former roommate — the beautiful, popular, privileged and white Thalia — she suggests that her students might want to look into it. A Black man who worked as the school’s athletic trainer was convicted of the killing, but a handful of internet sleuths believe the authorities got it wrong.
As her students dig into the case, she revisits her more than 20-year-old memories and wonders if perhaps she got some things wrong. Were the cool kids really not as cool as she thought they were? Was it possible that Denny Bloch, the charismatic music teacher she revered, was a sexual predator who was grooming Thalia and may in fact have killed her? With its ripped-from-the-headlines flavor, Makkai has written a complicated whodunit fueled by feminist rage as Bodie relentlessly interrogates her past and recalls the countless murders of girls and women whose stories have been all but lost in our collective memory. — Ann Levin, Associated Press
Will Schwalbe’s new
memoir, “We Should Not Be Friends,” explores an unlikely bond between two men who met in college and maintained a four-decadelong friendship.
When the story begins in the early 1980s, Schwalbe is a Latin and Greek major whose friend circle is comprised of writers, theater enthusiasts and fellow gay students on the Yale University campus. Through his induction into a secret society, Schwalbe is thrust into close quarters with a few Yale jocks — one of them, a wrestler known almost universally by his last name, Maxey — is the other titular “Friend.”
These guys aren’t sure what to make of each other at first, but Schwalbe and Chris Maxey eventually form an improbable kinship that endures as they confront a litany of life’s challenges: health scares, physical distance, relationship drama and much more.
The book scrutinizes the two-way nature of friendship and the difficulty inherent in maintaining one despite the roadblocks of time and distance. This is all good stuff, but “We Should Not Be Friends” is not at its best in this realm.
It is, however, when the reader learns more about Maxey and his goings-on. His time as a Navy SEAL. His efforts to start a school from scratch in the Bahamas, maintain and grow it. His relationship with his wife and four kids. A medical diagnosis that is eerily similar to one that befell his biological father.
Schwalbe, who lives in New York with his partner and eventual husband, sees Maxey at several Yale reunions, dinners in New York and even visits him in the Bahamas a few times. Those post-graduation interactions, coupled with phone calls, letters and emails, provide a fully realized picture of Maxey and his life.
There’s also a thoughtful — and honest — examination of the times that the pals sometimes fell short of being there for one another. And how, despite those few slip-ups, they always managed to right the (friend) ship.