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A review by remlezar
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
4.0
3.5 rounded up to 4.
I loved Makkai's "The Great Believers," so when I learned her new one was out and it was being compared to "The Secret History," I was all over it.
Overall I ended up liking and sometimes REALLY liking "Questions." The setting is memorable, the plot unfolds at a brisk pace, and there were some interesting and intriguing characters throughout.
Unfortunately, there were also so many characters that some of them became non distinct and blended into one another, which sometimes took the wind out of the book's sails. Either more time was needed to add texture to the large cast of characters, or extra trimming needed to be done.
The biggest issue was that some of the more literary and social issue driven elements didn't quite land. It's a metoo book, a book about toxic masculinity and sexual abuse on campuses, a book about the unfair treatment of black men in the justice system in America, and more. Which is all, it should go without saying, extremely legitimate and also painful and distressing to read about. But there's so much of that stuff that it occasionally felt more like set dressing as opposed to something the author had much to say about beyond, "this is real and it is a problem."
It also wanted to say a lot about the "murdered pretty young woman" stories that make headlines so often, and the strange and grotesque fascination the public has with those kinds of stories. But I couldn't help but feeling like the book itself was a piece of the same kind of exploitative media Makkai seems to be criticizing, just with a thin layer of self awareness. And that's not to say that that kind of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too book can't work, it's just that Gone Girl came out over a decade ago and was much sharper with its message.
So overall, kind of a tough one to evaluate. It was brisk, engaging, compelling, and disturbing. But it cast its net so wide, both thematically and character wise, that I don't quite know what to make of it. It was either a pretty good piece of genre thriller fiction, or something more literary that didn't quite reach the heights it was aiming for.
I loved Makkai's "The Great Believers," so when I learned her new one was out and it was being compared to "The Secret History," I was all over it.
Overall I ended up liking and sometimes REALLY liking "Questions." The setting is memorable, the plot unfolds at a brisk pace, and there were some interesting and intriguing characters throughout.
Unfortunately, there were also so many characters that some of them became non distinct and blended into one another, which sometimes took the wind out of the book's sails. Either more time was needed to add texture to the large cast of characters, or extra trimming needed to be done.
The biggest issue was that some of the more literary and social issue driven elements didn't quite land. It's a metoo book, a book about toxic masculinity and sexual abuse on campuses, a book about the unfair treatment of black men in the justice system in America, and more. Which is all, it should go without saying, extremely legitimate and also painful and distressing to read about. But there's so much of that stuff that it occasionally felt more like set dressing as opposed to something the author had much to say about beyond, "this is real and it is a problem."
It also wanted to say a lot about the "murdered pretty young woman" stories that make headlines so often, and the strange and grotesque fascination the public has with those kinds of stories. But I couldn't help but feeling like the book itself was a piece of the same kind of exploitative media Makkai seems to be criticizing, just with a thin layer of self awareness. And that's not to say that that kind of have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too book can't work, it's just that Gone Girl came out over a decade ago and was much sharper with its message.
So overall, kind of a tough one to evaluate. It was brisk, engaging, compelling, and disturbing. But it cast its net so wide, both thematically and character wise, that I don't quite know what to make of it. It was either a pretty good piece of genre thriller fiction, or something more literary that didn't quite reach the heights it was aiming for.