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Contemporary Fiction Views: Questioning the past [1]

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Date: 2023-05-09

An idyllic school campus?

Recalling the past, sorting through memories, wondering what may have really happened compared to what the viewer thought she saw and knew are key elements to Rebecca Makkai's latest novel.

I Have Some Questions for You also delves into #MeToo, true crime and dead white girl obsessions, podcasts, social media shaming and piling onto the latest perceived villain.

Even the title of the novel shows the multiple ideas the story encompasses. It's the kind of thing an interviewer, including a podcaster, would say. It's the kind of thing someone would say to draw in an audience, to try to engage their attention. It's also what the narrator of the novel would like to say to someone in her past who may have had something to do with the murder of a classmate.

Bodie is returning to the private New England school to which she was sent as the teenager of a destroyed family. She remembers spending those years as being on the outside, looking in, trying to fit in. She discovered she could hear other phone conversations by picking up one phone on campus. Bodie saved the tidbits overheard to feel that she knew things others didn't know, things that weren't supposed to be known, as a way to make herself feel more important, to feel she may someday belong.

Bode also is a stage manager, observing and tracking. It's what she was doing the night that Thalia, her roommate, playing Guinevere in the production of Camelot, disappeared. Her body was found in the school's pool.

A Black man in his 20s who worked there, Omar, was interrogated, confessed, recanted his confession and has been imprisoned for decades. To spend some time in this book with Omar and his family is a much-needed aspect not often seen in stories like this. Bodie finds a connection between their families. But instead of using that as a way to better understand them, she chastises herself for making everything all about her.

After 20-some years away, Bodie is returning to Grandby to teach two mid-term classes. One is on film, which she also has taught at UCLA. Scenes with the students serve as commentary on other parts of the story, such as the difference between showing a sequence on film -- which may show actual experience -- and a montage -- which may represent refracted memory. That's the kind of difference in bringing the past back and understanding what has happened and what is happening that Bodie wrestles with throughout the novel.

The other class is to guide students through creating and recording a podcast, like the successful one she cohosts. One of Bodie's suggestions to students is Thalia's murder. One of the students, Britt, takes her up on it. Britt has noticed the seamier aspects of true crime podcasts and yet wants to take this on. Whether she will succumb to the temptations that she complained about is shown.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the country, Bodie's artist husband, who she is separated from yet on great terms, is taking care of their two children and a new problem. A former lover has devised a show around things she didn't like about him, such as ordering pepperoni pizza when he knew she didn't like pork. Jerome now has become the latest #MeToo horrible man. The online pile-on leads to big consequences for him.

The subplot shows even more aspects to all the things that are examined in the main story. That leaves more room in the main narrative for the suspenseful tone to the story. Bodie encourages her student to find out what really happened to Thalia. Will this be the re-examination in which that murder is conclusively solved?

And, perhaps even more importantly to Bodie, will this podcast be a way for her to come to terms with the teacher who meant the most to her. Was Mr. Bloch involved with Thalia beyond the open door he had for all theater kids? Is Bodie remembering certain things correctly, or are they memories through the prism of how important Bloch was to her? He certainly always encouraged Bodie to be herself. How important was he to the students?

That last question shows why I Have Some Questions For You evokes The Secret History. The secrets, the privileged, the individual and group quests, it's all there. It's a world made for the additions of true crime and podcasts, for ways to question whether memory has been faithful and whether there is jumping to conclusions going on.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/5/9/2167995/-Contemporary-Fiction-Views-Questioning-the-past

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