(no subject)

[cahn]

troisoiseaux recced these two books and... then I read them right through, because both of them were quite compelling! They also make a good pair to chew on -- they're both concerned with journeys through life that have a large component involving high school/college during the 1990's.

I Have Some Questions for You (Makkai) 3+/5. This was a book that was doing a lot of things and by and large doing them well, although it didn't necessarily offer answers to everything (rightly so, since some of the questions it asked don't have good answers).

It's a book narrated by a podcaster, Bodie, who returns for a visit (in the 2018-ish time frame) to her old prep school, Granby, to teach a two-week mini-class in podcasting (and another in film studies, but that one is more ambience-related than plot-related). One of the students in the class decides to make a podcast regarding the girl who was killed while the podcaster was in school there.

The book is principally taking on true crime (the girl who was killed spawns much true-crime interest, including a reddit group and a YouTuber who is clearly obsessed with her) and #MeToo (the book abounds in a lot of misogyny and what we'd now call sexual harassment that Bodie and others recall from their time at Granby; at the same time, Bodie's husband is being "cancelled" and Bodie's having to deal with that as well). It also is a prep-school book, of course, of the type that I used to read somewhat obsessively; a rumination on the 90's; and a rumination on how people are always more complicated than we think they are (see also #MeToo, actually).

It made me think a lot, and I didn't always like what I was thinking. I went to high school at around the same time that Bodie did, and... the kinds of things she describes (boys behaving badly, especially to girlfriends or girls they wanted to be girlfriends), I know were around me in both high school and college, and (like Bodie, a little) I seem to personally have escaped by dint of sheer luck. Another thing I thought a lot about was my own teachers and mentors. I had male high school teachers that I adored because they taught me to love the subject and/or were genuinely nice; I'm sure I was in rooms alone (probably not with the door closed, but still) with probably all of them at one point or another, and neither they nor I ever thought anything about it, and I hate this book a little for reminding me that there are teachers/mentors for which that wasn't as innocent. (I did, not too much later in life, come in brief contact with one of these, though again luckily for me I was not at all his type and he was always perfectly polite and distant to me, and it was only years later that I learned about the other stuff when it got very messily public.)

The true crime part is interesting to me; I don't really like true crime because I feel uncomfortably like I'm getting enjoyment out of someone's real-life trauma. Writing fiction about true crime is sort of genius because you get a lot of the same kick out of the way people can hunt down clues and obsessively pore over videotapes of the victim and so on, without feeling like you're being RL voyeuristic about it; and the book also does some light examination of the desire to want to go all in on true crime. And there's also the bonus that true crime often doesn't have neat endings, but fiction does -- there's a nod to making it not-neat, but you do end the book knowing what's going on, which is not something that necessarily happens in real life.

Anyway... I'm not even sure how much I liked it -- I did like it, but it was more that it was chewy in ways I wanted to engage with and came at the right time where I was thinking about some of these things anyway, so I found it quite interesting.

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow (Zevin) 3+/5. Follows two friends and professional (platonic) partners, Sam and Sadie, through adulthood (and childhood, mostly through flashbacks), making video games together, hurting each other, and being there for each other. There is also a major spoiler/content warning that I was vaguely warned for beforehand and which I'm glad I was vaguely spoiled for.

The most important character who's not the two friends gets killed, awfully, in a shooting, about 2/3 of the way through the book.

This was perfectly pitched for me, in the sense that Sam and Sadie are about my age (I feel old that now Middle-Aged books about people who grow up to be middle-aged in the present day are now... aimed right at me); and it evoked a lot of nostalgia about my friends-and-platonic-academic-partners K and B; and also I'm not much of a gamer but I have lived enough adjacent to that world that I at least recognized some of the names (and of course Sam and Sadie, being That Age, grew up with Oregon Trail and Super Mario Brothers, both of which I did play).

This book could be thought of as in conversation with the Makkai above, in the sense that it covers the same period of time and touches on some of the same issues (e.g., Sadie is for a few years in a terrible, power-asymmetric relationship with her previous professor). I felt a bit that this book was more enjoyable (to me, at least) but less profound than the Makkai, both in terms of the prose and the depth to which it wanted to explore subjects. (I felt this on a few levels. At one point Sam and Sadie are at Harvard and MIT respectively, and although all the facts were right, namechecking a couple of Core classes and so on, I didn't feel like I got anything like a sense of what either college was like; besides the namechecks, it could really have been anywhere. Also warning for "I am a Super Smart Tech Girl at MIT therefore no other smart tech girl at MIT likes me," which did not annoy me quite as much as the last time I saw it (it's a pretty small part of the book; I think it's just motivating why Zevin didn't have to describe any college female friendships), but COME ON. It does not work like that!)

With both the Makkai and this book, I was occasionally a Cranky Older Person who in fact was an adolescent in this era and so I know that the average cishet nerdy adolescent in those days didn't really have the vocabulary of "safe spaces" or use "they" as a nonbinary pronoun. (I'm sure there were those who did, but... most of us just wish we'd had that vocabulary!)

Comments

[troisoiseaux]

I'm glad you enjoyed them! (And glad my warning for Tomorrow proved helpful— you can imagine my shock, having gone in completely blind!)

3+/5 is probably what I would give both books as well, although personally, I liked Makkai's more than Zevin's— I think because there was more to chew on? But I love it when books pair well together; I had stumbled on this combination completely by accident, and I think it really accentuated both books for me.

[cahn]

Your warning was very helpful!! I think I might have just not finished the book out of spite if I hadn't been warned! I also appreciated the pairing, which I agree, also accentuated both books for me!

And you know, now that it's been a few days since I've finished both of them, I can see that the Makkai will stay with me more than the Zevin...