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Rebecca Makkai: ‘I don’t feel like a mystery novel is necessarily that different from any other novel’

The Chicago-based writer on her new novel about a horrible crime on a boarding school campus, a world she knows intimately

Rebecca Makkai: 'I live on the campus of the boarding school where my husband teaches, and it’s a fascinating type of community.' Photograph: Brett Simison

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Martin Doyle
Sat Feb 10 2024 - 03:45

Your new novel, I Have Some Questions For You, set in New Hampshire, deftly explores the idea of collective memory, an unsolved mystery and adolescence. Can you tell us how it came about?

I live on the campus of the boarding school where my husband teaches, and it’s a fascinating type of community. I always knew I’d eventually write a boarding school novel, and – since I don’t write YA – that it would be about an adult looking back on that time. This came together with the idea of a wrongly solved murder – which is also about looking back – and with the MeToo era, which of course has been about a much-needed re-examining of the past. When things start to coalesce like that, I know I have a novel.

Who do we understand as the You of the title and what role do they play?

It becomes clear early on that Bodie is talking to (or at least thinking at) a former teacher. But readers will see the “you” in the title long before they meet Mr Bloch, and I do want that “you” to include and implicate all of us.

Your multilayered, complex narrative has a shocking crime at its core. Talk about the challenges of shaping it

Plotting out the crime itself – what happened, and when, and where – was of course tricky, but I’m fortunate to have quite a few friends who write mystery novels (in the classic sense), and I knew from them that I’d save myself infinite trouble later if I had all the details worked out before I began the book. While I adjusted a few things along the way, I basically had the core of the crime there all along, and I was able to build the book around it. I can’t imagine working at it from the other direction.

The boarding school setting was a rich one. Did living on a similar campus encourage you? And you were a fan of Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies?

I did love Skippy Dies, and in particular the way he (accurately!) depicts the lives of faculty members. So many books and movies about boarding schools focus only on the students, or include adults only insofar as they’re observers of the students’ lives. It’s been fascinating seeing the faculty side of things on the campus where I live, and while I bent over backward to make sure Granby (my fictional school) was different in major ways from the school where I live, I of course relied on my knowledge of how a boarding school works. One particular fascination for me, and it’s one that I bring up in the book, is the way faculty are always moving into each other’s old apartments, as families grow and people get seniority. It’s an odd thing to attend a party in your former home.

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Tell me about The Great Believers, a Pulitzer finalist. Did you want to move into totally different territory after it?

I want to move in a different direction after every book. What would be the point of retreading the same territory each time? That’s not why I became a writer.

The Great Believers, which is about the Aids epidemic in Chicago in the 1980s, was an incredibly research-heavy book for me. While there was a lot of research involved in I Have Some Questions For You (specifically research into the New Hampshire legal system), I did intentionally gravitate to a setting that I already knew well and wouldn’t have to research as much. I needed that break. The book I’m working on now involves a lot of historical research, and I’m glad I had a vacation from it meanwhile.

You like reading works in translation. What are you reading right now?

I just finished The Hostage, a Yemeni novel by Zayd Mutee’ Dammaj. It’s not as dark as the title suggests! I’m about to read The Open Door, an Egyptian novel by Latifa Al-Zayyat.

‘Every novel is a mystery.’ Can you unravel that for us?

I’ve said this in the past in part because I don’t feel like a “mystery” novel is necessarily that different in structure or tone from any other novel. Every story is posing (and perhaps answering) questions. When those questions are mostly about the future, we tend to call that suspense. When the questions are about the present, we might call that intrigue, or maybe philosophy. When the questions are about the past, that’s when we call it a mystery. We’re asking what already happened here. With this book, I wasn’t terribly interested in the mystery novel as a genre; I was more interested in how – in real life – we’re sometimes confronted with the aftermath of something terrible, and we have the impossible task of trying to see the past.

The best and worst things about where you live?

I could answer this about Chicago all day, but to answer very specifically about living on a boarding school campus: one of the best parts is the faculty community, knowing your neighbours very well and interacting with them on many different levels. Early in Covid we all made great use of the empty campus, holding outdoor parties and dinners. My least favourite thing about it is not having a garage. It snows a great deal here, and I’m constantly digging my car out.

Rebecca Makkai will be in conversation with Belinda McKeon at Ennis Book Club Festival on March 2nd at 8.30pm in Glór. I Have Some Questions For You is published in paperback by Fleet on February 29th