Here is my first book of 2023 released in 2023 – and yet, with much of the action taking place in 2018, and 1995, it feels like an artifact of a different time altogether. At times, this reads like a Serial origin story. In 2018, Bodie Kane is invited back to Granby, a boarding school in New Hampshire that she attended in the early 1990s. Her graduating class was infamous for the deaths of three students – one of those students being her roommate, Thalia Keith. Thalia was beautiful and popular, and on a cold night in March she was murdered and found in the pool. The circumstances of her death were never clearly explained, but within a short time Omar Evans was arrested for the crime. Omar had worked in the school for a short time – he was a young, black man who worked as an athletic trainer, and although his connection to Thalia seemed thin at best it wasn’t long before everyone was convinced of his guilt. He was imprisoned for the crime, and the graduating class of 1995 continued on with their lives.
Bodie’s return to campus is precipitated by the success of her podcast, which focuses on female Hollywood icons. She returns for what is termed “mini-mester”, an offering of two week, brief courses on a variety of topics. She agrees to teach two classes in this period – one on films, and the other on podcasts. This involves leaving her husband (Jerome, an artist from whom she’s basically separated) and two children back in L.A. while she lives in the New Hampshire cold for two weeks. It’s also the occasion for a reunion with one of her closest friends, Fran, who still lives and works on campus at Granby.
One of Bodie’s students wants to do a podcast on the Thalia Keith murder – specifically, this student feels that it’s likely that Omar Evans was wrongly convicted, and wants to explore the system that found him guilty. Bodie subtly encourages this path, wanting to know more about the murder for her own personal reasons. She suspects that the police overlooked an important person of interest – a teacher who was potentially grooming Thalia.
That’s the set up, and from there Makkai plots a well-paced novel that I could not put down. Bodie at times feels like an unreliable narrator – she clearly has her own traumas (many of which predate her time at Granby), and as a woman in her 40s returning to her high school, she is also revisiting her adolescence. Her worries about social status may not permeate her life in LA regularly, but back at her old stomping grounds she cannot help but return to a mindset that wants to preserve some facsimile of cool reserve that serves as a shield for teenagers. She never wants to seem too invested in Thalia’s story, despite the fact that it’s consuming her.
Against the backdrop of the main story, Makkai deftly weaves a number of side plots. There’s Bodie’s failing marriage with Jerome, which becomes complicated when a woman accuses him of sexual impropriety when they dated years ago (she was 21, working for a gallery showing his work, he was 36, a rather bad boyfriend who thought introducing her to a few other artists would suffice in place of a monogamous relationship). There’s the constant news stories that are interspersed throughout, someone is always reading a paper or turning on the television and hearing the one about the girl who … not that one, the one where the uncle … where the famous man said … where she took the money but he also asked for … These stories appear throughout, many referred to obliquely but yet your memory might be triggered. Or, sadly, in some cases, you’ll only nod and say, I think I know that one, but wait, it could ALSO be this one …
The thriller aspects are quite well done, but Makkai is really a master at raising these questions about the Me-Too era. This single story about Thalia Keith is set within a context of societal indifference to murdered girls. Or, maybe it’s a preoccupation with them (especially if they’re white, blond, rich) but indifference to pursuing justice for them. Or an indifference to creating a society with a balance of power. Who do we throw away, and why – these are questions Makkai is pursuing. We aren’t left with a character that we can love in this story, we’re left with a furious rage towards “you” – a nebulous framing device that establishes our frustrating relationship to people with power.