Great Details: On Rebecca Makkai

Reading through a contemporary writer's full "so far" works

This is the fifth section of Chase’s 2023 Reading in Review, a series of posts where Chase reflects on books read in 2023. The first is here. The reviews don’t assume you have read the works, and don’t spoil their experiences. This section primarily discusses:

• Rebecca Makkai’s The Borrower, The Hundred Year Old House, Music for Wartime, The Great Believers, “The Plaza”, and I Have Some Questions for You

• Julia May Jonas’s Vladimir

Full list of works discussed here.

The other writer whose work I read all of in 2023 is contemporary popular Rebecca Makkai (or at least what she’s put out so far!)

I read a lot of contemporary novelists, and most of those are contemporary debut novels, and here's a crude trend I see a lot. Any writer's first novel is going to have some challenges as a first novel, it (hopefully!) is not as good as their later work. I think the role of a literary community is to encourage writers who have something interesting to say through the process of debuting a novel even if that fist novel has wrinkles. I think that obligation extends into a second novel, which sometimes comes in a rushed way because a first novel was successful and now they have either an earlier (maybe worse) manuscript that gets rushed into publication, or they have less time to work on their second one.

But I also like to follow writers past these first two novels and it is enjoyable when you see them get to making work that feels mature, interesting, authentic to themselves. This trend is bucked constantly. Hernan Diaz seemed to do something incredible immediately with In the Distance and got better with Trust, and I just finished Isle McElroy's People Collide, their second novel, which felt considered and which I liked a lot more than The Atmospherians. Eliza Clark's great Penance, a favorite of this year, was a second novel that expanded on the promises she showed writing her first.

Rebecca Makkai's first novel, The Borrower, feels great from the start. Her narrator is a lonely young librarian Lucy Hull, performing a job below her abilities in a small town. Makkai pays the kind of honest attention to the task of being a children's librarian that makes the setting and circumstances feel real. Immediately, you can tell she loves writing the voice of the precocious other hero of the book, child Ian Drake, who is cute and intelligent and also so strange that he clearly will need protecting from the other students and from his villainous mean parents.

Rebecca Makkai outs herself as a reader in her first novel. The library setting shows a reverence for books, and it's dense with literary allusion too. Ian's mean parents feel like something from Roald Dahl or A Series of Unfortunate Events or the fairy tales that precede those books. Plucky Ian could be many of those protagonists, or Harry Potter. The matter of the early parts of the book is meant to evoke children's literature.

I found Rebecca Makkai this year because of children's literature: she published an incredible short story in The New Yorker (to promote her new novel I Have Some Questions for You. It is funny to note how often the New Yorker short story section is actually a press and promotion section for new work. Teju Cole did it this year too to promote his second novel after a decade, Tremor). Makkai's story "The Plaza" is about a woman seduced and entrapped by a rich man, and it's a great story about trust, love, betrayal, wealth, until it has a bit of a twist ending, which is that the woman we've been following gives birth to a daughter, they live in the Plaza hotel and that daughter is meant to be the titular Eloise from those children books.

I didn't know you could do that! Just write a prequel to Eloise as a short story and send it to The New Yorker!

Makkai's allusions in The Borrower span into adult works too. In the prologue, she alphabetizes the narrator’s last name Hull between Huck and Humbert, which puts the two other books that she's alluding to in clear focus: this is a story about an adult and a child travelling long distances where there is a bit of a strange power imbalance between them in both directions: that's both Huckleberry Finn's plot and Lolita's.

What I think Makkai is really good at in The Borrower is the way she slides into Lucy's life in the beginning and how rich this world feels. There is tension that Lucy will have to leave one day. She also does a great job logistically, something I think a lot of first novels don't think about. She's so careful in how she plots it so that Lucy both meets and does not meet Ian's mother, which is critical to the later plot. A worse novelist would have her never meet her, which means you don't get to see the character in the rich detail you need to see her in, but Makkai weaves it in correctly. It made me think she would be good at telling a detective story, which is what her latest book turns out to be.

Everything in that first half feels grounded and it escalates well. By the time we're getting the close POV scenes of Lucy taking Ian in her car after he has tried to run away from home, and we see her close decision-making as to what she needs to do and what she wants to do, it feels fully bought in. That Lucy becomes a kidnapper of Ian is not exactly unstated (the title of the book is that she borrows the kid, and she writes the prologue in which she explicitly promises that this is a story about a pseudo-kidnapping) but I think the genre turn from quirky story about a kid in a library to road trip story was probably something she was told to (or realized herself) lampshade more. So she added the prologue, etc.

In this second part, the story proceeds with good drama. Again, Makkai is good at the logistics of where they stay, what they eat, things that I think worse novelists wouldn't bother with (first novelists do vibes, not packed lunches). This is Flannery O'Connor's maxim: put the slippers on the clerks. Makkai is great at this.

I think her prose comes alive whenever she gets a chance to write Ian's voice and quirks; I love them singing new national anthems. Makkai also gets to play her games with having Lucy have a doppelganger stalker like in Lolita.

There are three things in The Borrower's second half I would question a bit, or I wonder if they were the right instincts. The first is the fact that despite Lucy being a bit of an anti-hero, she's completely unimpeachable. I'm thinking of what Moshfegh and O'Connor do so well: make characters with some distance between us and them by having them be genuinely ugly in some way, do something genuinely bad. But even though Lucy is a kidnapper (and she's being compared to pedophile Humbert Humbert), Makkai is so tight with her POV that we never ever ever think that Lucy is selfish, ill hearted, bad in anyway. Just that she maybe made a bad decision. The story can't hold space for anything but positive judgement of Lucy, even though she does things that are illegal she is always morally in the right because poor Ian needs her (Makkai does try to paint the parents' sadness and the wrongness of the act, I don't think the narrative makes the case that Lucy did the right thing, but it does make the case that Lucy did everything out of altriusm, not selfishness or any other kinds of ugly character traits).

The way that hurts the story is that because Lucy is right, always right, her arc gets short changed, because she can't learn anything other than: I should be less brash and make sure I don't do anything stupid. I can feel the way Makkai wrote herself into a pickle and struggled to end things. I think her ability to stay close to a likable protagonist is a strength of hers, but it hurts her here, and she has to reckon with it in later works too (More on this in I Have Some Questions For You)

The second is the other baggage clogging Lucy's arc: a story about her parents and escaping Europe that shows up in other Makkai works so as to suggest the author has a personal investment in telling that story. It's a great story, but it doesn't feel connected to Lucy's quest to "save" poor Ian, and so it ends up bifurcating attention away from the arc I wish Lucy was on.

The last thing I'd add is the story gets extremely sentimental in the ending, the same way a movie like Avengers Endgame gets, like it's taking a victory lap of all the great time you spent with these characters. I can get why a first novelist would feel that way about her first novel, but I'm not sure it's the tone the story needed.

I don't have as much to say about her second novel, The Hundred Year House. The story has another Cloud-Atlas-y structure that moves between time periods, backwards. I like her formal experimentation in that the novel's last chapter is called PROLOGUE. I like her attention to the history and fragility of artist communities, and I loved the sections about inter-department university politics and power dynamics. I think, again, her love of literature and children's literature is clear and compelling whenever she gets to describe the in-universe young adult girl book series Friends for Life, which were highlights.

Her short story collection Music for Wartime is the kind of collection where an author uses each story as a way to do something different, not where she tries to do the same thing over and over. I loved that. My clear favorite is "Good Saint Anthony Come Around" which has such breezy prose, feeling urban and jazzy and then all of a sudden doing these great tonal shifts to sadness. I feel her finding a groove that is totally different than the first two novels. Here we realize maybe how much Makkai likes telling stories about gay characters. I can see why she decided to take that thread and spin it for her third novel.

Her imaginative story "Couple of Lovers on a Red Background" in which a character finds composer Johann Bach has come forward into present time is great, again, made possible by how seriously Makkai takes the speculative logistics of things, what he does, what he eats, etc. I liked her ability to go back and forth in voice and experiment with style. Like I said, "Anthony" feels different than The Borrower, just like the contemporary voice of the reality-TV-producer "The November Story" is different than the morose mid-century war stories, of which there are many in here. "The Miracle Years of Little Fork" is a fairy tale, rich and complex and interesting, and I loved her restrained experimentation of "Everything We Know About The Bomber."

The Great Believers is the big book that I had seen everywhere over the last few years, and I get why. I was going to say it is the most ambitious book she had written so far, but Hundred-Year House was hugely ambitious, but there is something different in category here. Instead, of 4-5 time frames, Great Believers sticks to two with two major points of entry into the story. With this simplification, Makkai is able to fill the story with her attention to how things happen, layered meaningful story details, and sad emotion.

The way Makkai so confidently opens the story shows how much work she put into understanding and fleshing out her world. Set at a funeral for a gay man in the 1980s, the mood is perfect: characters feel the weight of the AIDS crisis but act jovially. There are deep big emotions of sadness, but also little annoyance of interpersonal drama, seeing an ex, feeling like you have other things to do. It makes the network of these characters' lives feel real, like they exist in the moments we do not see in prose. The tensions she establishes are complex: not just life or death with AIDS, not just the tension of the ways their parents see their lives vs the way a community does, but also the way each character sees the situation, how they each will choose to behave, and a big realistic cloud of uncertainty which is: no one knows what this is just yet. Like good stories should, the opening feels like a small encapsulation of the entire book: the party of a funeral turns into a strange, otherworldly (though it is eventually explained, Makkai will not drop logistics) moment when our main character Yale Tishman is left alone in an empty house, totally abandoned. It's eerie and moody, very well done.

Yale has a great plot and Makkai follows him closely so that by the end, he feels like a great literary character. We know him well. He works in art appraisal, and at the start of the story, he's stumbled upon what may be the find of his career, the opportunity to procure paintings for his university's collection that will be immensely valuable, if he can authenticate them. This is a great exciting novel plot, full of opportunity for drama and focused on the kind of "role of art in society" questions that I trust someone like Makkai with. She delivers here. The other protagonist is Fiona, the sister of Yale's friend whose funeral-party opens the book, and who exists both in Yale's story in 1985 and in her own later story as an adult in 2015.

The best part of the Great Believers is the plot, the way she puts togethers highs and lows and drama between hope and despair. AIDS looms, obviously, and the story pays weight to the moments of excitement when characters believe they have the virus and when they get lucky and discover they don't, and also the terrible ones where they believe they don't and discover that they do. It works because of the moment-to-moment attention she pays the interiority and, again, the logistics (e.g., the doctor character who helps characters get treatment without notifying anyone that would trigger them being on a list). I think when you set out to write a novel about this, you have to be ready to write the scenes of someone learning they are going to die, and not every novelist is up to that challenge. It would be easy to use literary flourish to avoid writing that sincere shocking pain (e.g., time skip). But Makkai takes the challenge, and she does it emotionally and ultimately well.

This is a larger point: Makkai isn't the kind of writer who shies about from doing the groundwork of great storytelling. Minor moments are constructed well (e.g., Fiona's opening chapter in 2015 on a plane encountering a drunk man, Yale in his office at work talking to his boss, Fiona drinking at a cafe). Her prose is always readable. In the end, she earns the big payoff of the emotion of this story because of her investment in Yale as a character, and in the little details of his emotional journey navigating the uncertainty of what AIDS was in the moment of it.

Her most recent novel is, in my opinion, her best. I Have Some Questions for You feels like a novel she would have struggled to write if she hadn't learned from her other books how to focus more deeply, how to include the details that make a story richer and how to cut things that will distract from it.

Again, Makkai is open about her themes and inspirations. This is a novel inspired by the podcast Serial, and full of discussions about cancel culture (I wonder if Makkai, either while writing or publishing The Great Believers, writing about gay men as a seemingly-non-gay-man, was thinking about getting canceled, about whether she should have told that story, and if she channeled that thinking into this one).

The biggest accomplishment of this novel is its arc for its main character, and again, this is not flashy, not a trick, not achieved by anything other than doing the great logistically moment-to-moment work of storytelling. At the start of the novel, Bodie Kane returns to her high school boarding school alma mater to teach for a two week intersession period, and Kane tells us her headspace clearly. She is not interested in the murder of her former roommate back when they were at school together. We get her moment-to-moment thought patterns as she thinks about a thousand things that are not her dead roommate Thalia Keith. When the students in the podcasting class (love this idea) start to poke towards Thalia, we get the little shuffle of snow in which Kane starts to reconsider the case. Moment to moment, Bodie evolves consistently, only moving one step at a time in being more interested in the case. Kane at the beginning is clearly uninterested in getting involved in investigating Thalia's death. Kane at the end of those two weeks is so thoroughly completely invested. That transition is just great storytelling.

The other accomplishment is the actual facts of the case. The art of crime fiction is making a good case that is both simple enough to be understand but complex enough not to be guessed immediately. The murder of Thalia Keith is a great crime story. It has the right number of suspects, the right ordering and revelation of details, the right tempo between thinking about and suspecting people versus learning new information that pushes us in another direction. This is a book that, like the podcast Serial, I kept going back to quickly because I wanted to get more.

Also of note is Makkai's restraint. There are three types of chapters in this book: a first "half" which takes places in the two weeks Kane is teaching at the school, a second "half" which follows a time jump, and little numbered chapters that are meant to be imaginary, each named for a suspect of the case, in which we see in close view the way that suspect would have accomplished the murder. It would have been very very tempting to write sections that took place in Kane's time at the school as a kid, but I think the book is so much stronger in that she doesn't, that every moment has to be filtered through memory.

The plotline about cancel culture (not entirely a new theme for her, it's all over The Hundred-Year House) is measured and good.

I want to compare it to the best writing about being canceled (in my opinion): Julia May Jonas's Vladimir. There, our protagonist, a professor whose husband has been sleeping with his students and is in scandal for it, is confronted by her own students after class. This is a passage that has stuck with me since I read it, so I’ll quote the full scene.

Toward the end of the spring semester, I was sitting in my office when a group of five young women from my Adaptations class entered, giggling with what was clearly their own sense of self-importance and buoyed-up enthusiasm they had roused in whatever cabal they’d had before. I invited them in, and they exchanged daring glances until Kacee, clad in a flowered baby doll and lace stockings with a Japanime hairstyle—two buns, one on each side of her head—a girl who would attach a pen cap to the fat bottom part of her lip during class and “accidentally” pull her shirt down so that one nipple was exposed, a girl who always laughed too loudly at anything the one very handsome boy said in class, stepped forward.

“We wanted to talk to you, um,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. They were already annoying me. They were an annoying bunch. Individually I’m able to drum up, most of the time, a sense of patience and tolerance for each student. Even the extremely grating ones. I don’t know what happens in one’s youth to make one student so tolerable, so pleasant, so secure in themselves, so eager to learn, and what makes other students so irritating. But I pride myself on not discriminating against them because of it. With most of my students, I’m able to understand their need to be seen, and I’m able to focus on that need and let their ticks and blips, their entitlements, their insecurities or overconfidences, simply wash past. I’m able to see them in progress, and to know them in progress. To know that they don’t yet fully grasp what they are presenting to the world as they present it.

But if even irritating students can be withstood individually, and pleasant students can be excellent company, students in groups are always awful. They get too much bravery from each other, they forget to behave well. The interaction with this group led by Manic Pixie Kacee was bound to be painful.

“Well, um, we just wanted to say, um.”

Becca, a tall girl who took her emotions as seriously as cancer, wearing a baggy turtleneck over a baggy dress over baggy pants (Joke: How do you get into a hippie’s pants? Take off her skirt, first), stepped up.

“Well, we just wanted to say, like, you don’t, you don’t have to, like, do the whole supportive silent wife thing.”

I breathed in, white-hot anger rushing up my forearms into my elbows.

Then Tabitha, in her mechanic’s jumpsuit, worn unbuttoned to the waist so that her bra was visible, stepped forward.

“Like, you’re this hot, brilliant lady. We think you’re really hot.” I could tell they prized their own opinion of my hotness, their ability to appreciate hotness in an older woman. “And like, it is totally unfair what he’s done to us.”

“You?” I asked

“Us women,” she said.

“Ah,” I said. “Not you personally.”

Kacee stepped forward again.

“We just want to know when you’re gonna dump his ass.”

“Cause you should,” someone in the chorus piped up.

Careful, Careful, Careful, I thought to myself. Careful. We professors talked about it all the time. Nowadays you must be so careful. It’s good, it’s good, we would say to each other. It’s good, that there’s safety. Though we all wondered what we were preparing these students for with all our carefulness, as if the world was going to continue being as careful. But then again maybe it was, we would say. Maybe if these were the people who were in the world, who were comprising the professional culture, then the world would have no choice except to be more careful. And that would be a good thing. People said this crop of youth was weak, but we knew differently. We knew they were so strong—so much stronger than us, and equipped with better weapons, more effective tactics. They brought us to our knees with their softness, their consistent demand for the consideration of their feelings—the way they could change all we thought would stay the same for the rest of our lives, be it stripping naked for male directors in undergraduate productions of The Bacchae, ignoring racist statements in supposedly great works of literature, or working for less when others were paid more. They had changed all that when we hadn’t been able to, and our only defense was to call them soft. They had God and their friends and the internet on their side. And perhaps they would make a better world for themselves. Their aim was not to break taboos, the way people born ten to twenty years before me, and, in a small way, my generation, had done. No, they worked in a subtler and stricter way. And perhaps it had to be so. And so Careful, I told myself. No anger, no personal attacks, just Grace, Grace, Grace.

The girls stood nervously in front of me, waiting for my response. I cultivated warmth in my chest and brought it up to my face. I pushed the warmth through my smile, letting it settle around my eyes.

“I want to thank you for coming to see me. I’m flattered on two accounts: for calling me a ‘hot lady’ and for the care that you’re extending toward me. It makes me feel hopeful for the future to be surrounded by young women who are as passionate and empathetic as you are.

“Sit down”—I urged them, and they crammed onto the couch and its arms, facing me.

“We all live and work within structures and institutions,” I told them. “We can’t help it. I work, I live, inside of institutional sexism, racism, and homo- and transphobia, for example. And the difficult thing to understand about these institutions is that we all, however aware of it we are or not, practice sexism, racism, and homo- or transphobia, even if we are female, a person of color, or homosexual or a trans person. And so I’m fully willing to admit that my remaining with my husband—not standing by his actions, necessarily, but simply remaining in relationship to him—may be a product of my own internalized sexism. Certainly how could it not be.”

“Right,” said Kacee, a band of saliva visible in her open mouth.

“That said, and I say this again, with such deep gratitude for the care you’ve extended toward me, that my husband and I have had a life together longer than any of you have been alive. And we’ve had agreements, and arrangements, and compromises throughout that time. And challenges. We’re now faced with another challenge. Both a public challenge and a private challenge. I know that you will understand if I beg for your understanding, and respect of my privacy, as I decide for myself, as a hot, brilliant lady, how I will handle my marriage of thirty years. Extending me that courtesy is an act of feminism in and of itself.”

Ten minutes later I closed the door to my office waving and blowing kisses as they beamed at me.

Assholes, I thought.

I love the complexity of this scene.

The POV of our protagonist (the professor) is so well articulated. She paints the girls as so misguided, so mistakenly self-righteous about their cause that they have committed this ugly faux pas of confronting their professor in this inappropriate way, and then when our professor manages to achieve her goal of speaking to them with intense grace, it seems both miraculous and we feel the emotional tax and misbehavior she is enduring.

But at the same time, look at how subtle the ugliness is on the professor's side too. The way she describes the girls to us (to herself?) is blatantly misogynist: note her contemptuous focus on the sexual-y ways the girls dress, how desperate she is to describe them as "not actually feminist" so that she can dismiss them. My favorite is when she insults the girls by calling them strong (and thus bullies), she's doing the same technique they are when they call her a "hot lady!" The girls are doing something wrong, of course, but the professor's actions are worse, more damning, of a higher order of problematic that is difficult to even articulate. This is a misogynist, misanthropic voice but it's laundered through justice-speak. It's complex and great writing.

I want to bring up this complexity next to Bodie Kane, because there's something similar at play. Unlike Jonas's narrator, whose ugliness is a bit more naked, Kane isn't someone I think Makkai ever paints for us to dislike (just like Lucy Hull). Everything Makkai does stylistically brings us closer to her POV. We enjoy seeing the world through Kane's eyes. We are attracted and calmed by the tight 1st person, easy breezy stream-of-consciousness, the use of the 2nd person to bring "us" into the accusing party against the "you" of the accused party. We like Kane, we want to like Kane.

Lots of stories use this POV as a point of subversion: you feel close to a character who is lying to you. Is Bodie Kane lying to us?

No, I don't think so, and neither does Rebecca Makkai. In an interview at the Toronto Library, our author says:

You have to make a decision about this as an author. How honest is this person with himself? And then how honest are they with whoever they're talking to, whether that's us in general or in this case, a very specific audience who we're gonna talk about it later. I made the decision that she's never gonna lie. She is always gonna be painfully honest but so painfully honest that we're gonna doubt her.

Because unlike someone who's saying, "This is definitely the way it happened, trust me, trust me," she's constantly going, "I think it was like this, wait, maybe it was like this, Oh My God, here's this thing I forgot and am I making it up?"

And this is as honest as she can be, but that level of honesty is of course, going to... I know as the author, for the reader, raise these questions where if she had kind of, if as the author, I had kind of bluffed like, "of course memory is incredibly reliable" you might have on the surface had more confidence in her.

What other ways are there to be unreliable other than lying? This is not just important to understand Kane, it's important to understanding the themes of the book. If you're not lying, why do you misremember? What clouds your judgement even if you intend to tell the truth?

You could call it "bias" or "prejudice" or "ideology" but everyone has superstructure heuristic stories that guide how to see the world.

Kane points us to one such "insider/outsider" prejudice that she cites as one reason the black Omar was arrested for the murder in the first place:

It was still possibly true that Omar had followed Thalia around, that he’d “made her uncomfortable,” as Robbie said, or “sketched her out” as Marco said, or “kind of stalked her,” as Rachel said, or that he’d joked about tying Thalia to the weight bench, as Dorian and Mike and their ski friend Kirtzman all mentioned.

But it was also possible her friends had jelled their memories together, even subconsciously, in the days before their interviews, around a person who wasn’t part of their group, wasn’t a teacher or a student—someone who seemed enough of an outsider to have done a thing we couldn’t imagine one of us doing. As humans have intuited since the dawn of time, blaming the problem on someone outside your circle takes the problem far away. And it made sense that even Marco, a Black Granby student bound for Babson, would see Omar as fundamentally different

The crux of Kane's mission in this book is the rectify the way that these gossipy prejudices have resulted in a miscarriage of justice. Omar was convicted on gossip and bias, not a good standard of proof! Kane knows her mission is just.

What's fun is the way that Kane then pushes forward through similar corridors of gossip and bias. Early in the story, Kane begins to reflect on her high school teacher Mr. Bloch and develops the belief that he was sleeping with, and then eventually killed, the murder victim young girl Thalia. This is the engine of Kane's journey, her investment in this thesis and her desire to see justice done to Mr. Bloch.

As we're reading, we feel aligned with Bodie Kane. We also want justice, just like we might have wanted justice when listening to Serial. But Rebecca Makkai twists this for us, because she points out that the basis for judging Mr. Bloch guilty and the basis for judging Omar are not that different.

We don't ever get to meet Mr. Bloch. We don't get any evidence that Mr. Bloch was indeed having an affair with Thalia. We just get Bodie's suspicion, fueled by her sense of justice, just like those girls in Julia May Jonas's professor's office were fueled by their own sense of justice.

Here's Kane and a friend talking about the way rumors are both the right and wrong basis for justice:

"Even now, with my own kids, it’s confusing as hell. I tell them not to believe rumors, and then my daughter is like, But rumors are how we know if someone’s an abuser. She has that vocabulary at twelve, which blows my mind. So I’m supposed to say, Yes, believe those rumors, but not the other ones? Only believe rumors about men?”

“Well,” I said. “Believe women. It’s not perfect, but maybe it’s a start.”"

Beth snapped her head to look right at me for the first time. “Sorry, but didn’t your husband get totally me-tooed?” She was back to her sharpest voice. As if the whole conversation had been a trap, just like “Nice top” had once been.

I said, “Someone had some issues with him.”

“So you’re one to talk. You don’t believe that woman, but you believe women when it suits you.”

The climax, in my opinion, of the book comes when Bodie finally does twist the truth. Not to us as the reader, but to a connection who she pushes to investigate Bloch further:

I couldn’t lose him. I couldn’t lose this chance… I felt myself about to lie, felt myself stepping over a line. But it was in service of a greater truth. And if I wanted Dane to latch on to it, I needed to give him something he’d never heard, something he felt was exclusive. “I overheard all kinds of things. It was also the dorm where Mr. Bloch had evening duty once a week. And—listen, I probably shouldn’t tell you this. But I still think about it. It was threatening.”

“He threatened her?”

“He was saying, You have to say yes, you have to say yes. It was a week before she died. He was like, You can’t do this to me.” If I’d had time, I could have thought up better dialogue. “The thing is,” I said, “the threat was in his tone, not his words. It was subtext. It’s not something I could testify about. He didn’t say, If you don’t do it I’ll kill you. But it was—you know that voice alpha males get, just telling the world what to do?”

I figured Dane for a person who put great stock in the power of alpha males. And indeed he nodded, eyes intensely focused.

How funny, to think of you as alpha anything.

I said, “But they’re not about to investigate some guy just because I got a vibe. Plus, how easy would it be for them to say I’d misidentified the voices? And who would believe me about the phone thing to begin with? It would damage my credibility.”

She's careful not to implicate herself legally, but ethically, morally, here we have Kane telling us that she is pursuing an outcome more than she's pursuing the truth.

It makes Kane's arc more complex, because on one hand, she gained deeper better political consciousness. She fought for the conviction of a black man to be overturned, she re-evaluated the demons of her childhood past and gained better feminist understanding of just how rapey her high school culture was. These are good things! But she also started the story with the understanding that if she tried to get involved in re-evaluating Thalia's murder, she would simply be seen as "doing it for her own personal selfish attention-seeking goals" and that's a bit of where the book ends with having happened.

(I think there's another example of this too in the story of one of Kane's childhood abusers who grabs Kane's and a friend's breasts when they were in school together. Kane develops conviction that the woman's eventual death from breast cancer was caused by this, even telling a stranger that he gave her friend breast cancer. This is a great version of that plot in miniature. Sexual abuse is an evil similar to how breast cancer is, but the link is not the same legal justice standard that Kane swears by, there's something tricky about her assertion there!)

I think that's the narrative purpose of the late-game suspect who comes into the center stage as Thalia's murderer close to the end of the novel. If you were ready to believe it was Mr. Bloch and all of a sudden you can believe it's this new suspect, what kind of basis of truth do you have for this justice? Are we so easily tricked? Bodie Kane seems to be. This is the kind of thing that's very very hard to talk about straight on, because the issues are sensitive, the biases both bad (e.g., accusing a black man of being a murderer) and hard to call bad (e.g., accusing a teacher of being a pedophile).

Click here for the sixth post of 2023 Reading in Review when it’s posted and subscribe below to get email alerts for new posts. Full list of works discussed here.